Stop whatever you’re doing this morning and book yourself tickets to see the new Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum pronto. The retrospective, which finally opened its doors over the weekend, was extended back in January by two weeks, taking its run to August 2 after an unsurprisingly overwhelming response when news broke that the exhibition would finally come to London.
Just to give you a bit of background, the Savage Beauty exhibit debuted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art back in 2011, only 10 months after the designer’s death and quickly joined the likes of the Treasures of Tutankhamun, Mona Lisa and Picasso in the museum’s pantheon of the most visited exhibitions. In total, a whopping 661,509 visitors viewed the exhibition and after four years of waiting, you can finally go and see it in London at the V&A.
‘London is where I was brought. It’s where my heart is and where I get my inspiration.’ Those are the words of Lee McQueen that greet you when you enter the exhibition that has been designed not only to pay tribute to his work, but also to pay tribute to the man himself in a more personal way than the New York version in the city he called home.
If you were lucky enough to see the exhibition the first time round, there’s still reason to see it again. Where collaborators only had a short amount of time to get involved and donate clothes and research, the London version is full of pieces that were unavailable to the Met and that’s partly why the exhibition is so big, taking over three of the museum’s intersecting exhibition areas.
The retrospective celebrates everything from his visionary 1992 MA graduate collection through to his unfinished AW 2010 collection, all staged with the theatrics that were so synonymous with his runway shows. There’s honestly nothing I can to say to describe quite how magical the exhibition is apart from the fact that even the staunchest McQueen fan will leave feeling even more mesmerised.
As if that wasn’t enough, the museum is also opening early and late to facilitate the demand. An additional 50,000 tickets were released to meet the demand back in January, most of which have now completely sold out so if you want to see it, move fast because you won’t be able to forgive yourself if you miss it.
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty runs from 14 March – 2 August 2015. Vam.ac.uk/savagebeauty