THERE was a reason Alexander McQueen, who committed suicide last year at the age of 40, was considered one of the greatest fashion designers of his generation, admired by his peers for his astounding technical ability and idolized by students for his near-fearless risk taking. “People don’t want to see clothes,” he once said. “They want to see something that fuels the imagination.”
But while he was revered in fashion, and his runway shows were among the most closely watched, almost no one could have imagined that, as the subject of a museum exhibition, Mr. McQueen would prove to be almost as popular as Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.
At some point this weekend or thereabouts, and with still a week to go in its three-month run, the wildly popular McQueen retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, based on its current trajectory, will set an attendance record for a fashion exhibition there when it surpasses the 576,000 visitors for “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” in 2008. By the time it closes on Aug. 7, in all likelihood it will rank among the museum’s 20 most popular exhibitions since it began tracking attendance 50 years ago.
Since the exhibition opened in May, its galleries have been mobbed with hundreds of guests at a time, from morning until night, with sometimes hours-long lines waiting behind ropes, framed by famous works of Gustave Moreau, Auguste Rodin and Henri Regnault.
Its duration has been extended at least twice and, for the last two nights, Aug. 6 and 7, the museum has announced it will stay open until midnight, the first time the Met has kept an exhibition open so late. As of Friday morning, 553,000 people had seen the show, including quite a few who would have professed that they cared not a thing about fashion.
“You take a medium like fashion that you don’t think is going to have that much depth, and then you find that it does,” said Edward Murguia, 67, a sociology professor at Texas A&M University, as he exited the show on a recent afternoon. His wife had dragged him along, he said. “You can just see people walk by saying, this is great art, and they are fascinated by this,” he said. “I could never imagine how much he got done in such a short life. It’s just amazing to look at the level of detail.”
The degree to which “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” has ignited wide-scale public interest would have been a remarkable achievement for any exhibition dedicated to the work of a single artist. But the fact that it was one whose chosen medium was fashion design makes it a phenomenal achievement, surpassing the expectations of museum officials and perhaps defying them in an institution where, until recent years, costume shows had historically been confined to its basement.
How this success happened is not so easily explained, not even by the growing importance of Mr. McQueen during his short career. You might have heard his name because of the circumstances of his death or, in April, because of the wedding gown created for Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, by Sarah Burton of the studio that survives him.
Or you might have heard of him well before that, as the British provocateur who frequently thumbed his nose at the royal family, who once created pants that were cut so low that they were nicknamed the bumster, who had problems with drug and drink, and who fearlessly, and often brilliantly, presented collections of wonderfully imaginative clothes for which models were cast as inmates in an insane asylum, pieces of a chess set or victims of extreme plastic surgery.
And yet, helping to explain the long lines and claustrophobia-inducing crowds at the Met, you might not have had a very clear picture of who Mr. McQueen was, as a designer and as a person, and quite arguably as an artist, had you not seen this show.
“It really is an emotional connection, and I think that has to be the key to it all,” said Trino Verkade, the longtime creative coordinator of Mr. McQueen’s studio, who has spent countless hours in the galleries this summer, watching people as they react to his designs. “Everybody feels emotions,” she said. “They can easily recognize them in Lee’s work,” referring to the designer by the name his close friends called him, “and they have identified with those emotions as they walk through.”
Word of mouth about the show, its fantastic theatricality and special effects that include a three-dimensional hologram of Kate Moss (as well as about the clothes, which include frightening concoctions made of feathers, razor clam shells, medical slides printed to look as if they were bloodied, resin vulture skulls and simulated human hair) has exposed Mr. McQueen’s work to the kind of audience the designer had always dreamed about.
Ms. Verkade said he often complained that, season after season, he was showing his clothes to the same 700 or so editors and buyers. In 2009, when he was one of the first designers to stream a runway show live online so everyone could watch at the same time, the hosting Web site went down under the strain of consumer demand.
So it would be incorrect to suggest that Mr. McQueen was underappreciated in his lifetime: people clamored to see his shows, though his extreme behavior could sometimes aggravate the editors who followed him closely. Anna Wintour wrote in an editor’s letter in Vogue that he had once flown over from London to be photographed by Irving Penn and then refused to leave his hotel room.
Because he was shy, Mr. McQueen seemed to be able to express himself most openly through his designs, but sometimes they were difficult to see clearly when the dresses passed by so quickly on a runway. Now in a museum, clothes that suggest romanticism, battles between darkness and light, between love and sadness, or even life and death, take on new meaning.
“He did imbue so much of his work with this sense of self,” said Andrew Bolton, the curator of the exhibition. “I never realized it until I looked at all of his clothes, but he was such a brave person that he was able to use fashion to discuss and reveal his interior self.”
In a sense, the popularity of the exhibition reflects not only the broadening cultural interest in fashion, but also a very specific interest in Mr. McQueen’s work by young people, including a generation that is defined by its embrace of technology in a way that fascinated Mr. McQueen and influenced his designs.
At fashion colleges across the country, his work is consistently cited among students as the most creatively inspiring. Simon Collins, the dean of the school of fashion at Parsons the New School for Design, said, “I think their admiration was as much for Lee’s passion for pure artistic creativity as much as it was for what he actually designed.”
As she walked out of the show, Kristin Goett, a 15-year-old aspiring lawyer from South Salem, N.Y., said, as far as she was concerned, McQueen was a household name.
“He truly changed the way fashion is looked at today,” she said. “He challenged you to think in a different way. His creativity was shown in ways that we might not be comfortable seeing, nor in ways we are used to seeing, but I think people really like to see different ways of creativity being shown.”
For the Met, which, like most cultural institutions, has struggled to maintain financing during the recession, the exhibition has been a major windfall. In addition to the $10 million raised through its annual Costume Institute gala, organized by Ms. Wintour, the museum has benefited from related sales of merchandise and increased membership subscriptions. The extreme summer heat that pushed people indoors and an exceptional number of tourists in New York were other factors that have played into its high attendance, said Harold Holzer, a Met spokesman.
As of last week, the museum had sold 55,000 copies of the exhibition catalog ($45) in its building alone, while the number of new members who have joined the museum (allowing them to skip the line at the exhibition) from the opening through July 24 nearly doubled to 17,500 from a comparable period last year.
On his second visit to the show, Allan Bennington-Castro, who recently moved to New York from Hawaii, where he owned an art gallery, said the designer’s impact, even since his death, had extended far beyond fashion and gay cultures and well into the mainstream, from the royal wedding to some of the claw-shaped shoes worn by Lady Gaga, who included a reference to the designer in “Fashion of His Love” on her new album.
“In this generation, he is far more relevant,” Mr. Bennington-Castro said. “So rather than the traditional Gucci or Prada, it’s Alexander McQueen.”
http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/
http://www.alexandermcqueen.com/alexandermcqueen/en_US
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