The first major Australian exhibition of the late British fashion superstar Alexander McQueen will come to Melbourne this summer, almost 13 years since his death in 2010 — and seven after the landmark exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty broke records at London's Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), with more than 480,000 tickets sold.
Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse will open at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) on December 11, and is a collaboration between that institution and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where it opened in April.
Rather than reattempting a comprehensive, biographical retrospective such as Savage Beauty (which was initiated by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it premiered in 2011), this new exhibition celebrates each museum's extensive holdings of McQueen's work, which include major private bequests.
Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse also draws on the permanent collections of LACMA and the NGV to tease out the eclectic inspirations for the designer's work, which ranged from 15th-century religious art to 18th-century Scottish history, cinema, birds and butterflies.
The show will span 25 McQueen collections and almost his entire career, from 1994's Banshee (his third collection and second professional runway collection since his now-legendary St Martins graduate show, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims) to his final full collection, 2009's shimmering tribute to nature, Plato's Atlantis.
The NGV started collecting McQueen in 1996, acquiring works directly from the designer — including pieces from his pivotal Highland Rape collection, where he controversially sent models down the runway in postures of distress and disorientation, wearing torn and stained garments, as a comment on Britain's violence against Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries.
It was not the only time McQueen explored his Scottish heritage on the runway, and the NGV exhibition will spotlight another key collection, with 12 looks from 2006's Widows of Culloden, which referenced a brutal 18th-century battle between British forces and Scottish 'rebels', and encapsulated recurring McQueen motifs such as tartan, birds and lace.
The NGV iteration of Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse will build on the 60 garments and accessories featured in LACMA's exhibition (drawing on their extensive holdings, the largest in North America) and add nearly 50 additional designs from the NGV collection.
The exhibition will take over the ground floor exhibition space of the NGV, where the exhibition Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto recently closed.
Katie Somerville, senior curator of fashion and textiles for NGV, says fashion nerds will particularly appreciate a set of "toiles" ('draft' or prototype versions of dresses) included in the exhibition.
Somerville, who was in her first year as an assistant curator in NGV's fashion department when the gallery first acquired McQueen's work, has worked on the exhibition with Danielle Whitfield (curator of fashion and textiles, NGV) and curators from LACMA.
She says: "[McQueen] had a very curious mind; he had an incredible collection of books [and] he was very interested in history. And he very much went out and got into collections and looked at works in storage. Claire Wilcox at the V&A, for instance, had an experience of him accessing things in the collection for that purpose."
Clarissa Esguerra, associate curator of costume and textiles at LACMA, who initiated the exhibition after a major donation of McQueen pieces by Los Angeles-based collector Regina J. Drucker, says that she and her team were almost like detectives in working to identify some of the designer's more obscure references.
"McQueen was an encyclopedic artist, drawing from inspiration from all over the world, different time periods and mediums," says Esguerra.
In conceiving the exhibition, she says an early "aha moment" came when she and her colleagues were looking at a dress from the Scanners collection (2003), which referenced the story of migration from the Arctic tundra of Siberia, through Tibet, into Japan.
"We were looking at the geometric pattern in the fabric, and we were like, 'What is this? What is this pattern? Can we identify it? Does it have significance?' And it does — it is a pattern that's very important to Tibet, because it was used as a Buddhist textile. And that textile motif moved to Japan with Buddhism.
"So [we realised that] he's telling the story of migration and fashion drawing on textile history — and our minds were blown. We were like, 'Oh my God, can we figure this out with other objects?'" she recalls.
She says John Matheson — a collector and archivist of McQueen's work — was also an invaluable consultant on the exhibition, combing through old interviews and show notes.
An exhibition like Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse is only possible because of the nature of both LACMA and NGV as 'encyclopedic museums': institutions whose collections span diverse mediums from across the globe and throughout history.
At NGV, the exhibition will feature more than 70 artworks and objects from their permanent collection — including photography, paintings, sculpture, antiquities, textiles, and historical fashion — in what should be an intriguing imbrication of art and fashion.
Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse will be on display at NGV International, Melbourne, from December 11-April 16.
