82nd & Fifth from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Andrew Bolton

Photography by

Oi-Cheong Lee

No. 13 [Collection], Spring/summer 1999
Alexander McQueen (British)
Balsa wood, leather, metal
Purchase, Gould Family Foundation Gift, in memory of Jo Copeland, 2011 (2011.170a, b)

This was the first show
of McQueen’s I went to.
I saw it, Fall, 1998.
I’d always had a deep fascination for
fashion, but at this
stage it was less academic
and more personal, really.
There was so much mythology around McQueen at this stage.
You knew he was going to do something to provoke or to confront you.
And I walked in and it was a room with bare floorboards.
The models came out and they seemed to just possess the building.
One was this winged structure made out of balsawood that’s been perforated
that resembles
butterfly wings,
and they moved
in a very light way,
they almost
fluttered as
she walked.
In my mind’s eye it was enormous, it had this monumentality to it that was just breathtaking.
And when the light shines through
it has almost like a stained glass window effect.
So she walked into the room, you had this vision of this gothic angel
in the face of industrialism.
The show was about this tension between
craft and technology and man and machine. It’s not about
wearability, it’s pure-concept fashion. But I remember thinking at the time:
How wonderful to walk around a city of angels
where you’d have people
dressed like this. And I thought for the first time,
he’s actually crossing the divide between art and fashion.
He offered a vision of the world that I just hadn’t thought about before, through extreme fashion, that was difficult to watch.
He would always say, “I’m not doing a cocktail party, I want my
shows to create a reaction, I want them to make you vomit.”
What was, I think, rather singular about McQueen was how he imbued his fashions with deep emotion.
When I first watched it, it was purely visceral, and made me question the requisites of clothing.
To me, fashion is enlivened by people’s intense emotional responses. It’s easier to appreciate it from the head.
It’s often harder to appreciate it from the heart, and I think this was
one of the shows that initially touched me.
My response to it was one of reverence.
It in a way made me judge fashion harsher. McQueen would expose the superficiality of some fashions and
make you realize that fashion needs to be this elevated discipline.
I look back at it now and I still get goose bumps. It changed my eye completely in terms of fashion.

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82nd & Fifth

Extreme FashionAndrew Bolton

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