Performance In the Cabinet of Curiosities: Or, The Boy Who Lived in the Tree

Dedicated to Herbert Blau

Celebrating the creative talent of one of the most innovative designers of recent times, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty¹ was announced by the Victoria and Albert Museum in the artist’s hometown of London as the first and largest retrospective of McQueen’s work presented in Europe. The V&A later published its success “in numbers” by claiming that half a million visitors from eighty-four different countries attended the museum, which remained open throughout the night during the final weekends due to “unprecedented demand.” The original show was organized by the Costume Institute for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City back in 2011, becoming one of the most visited exhibitions ever, and creating problems, as curator Andrew Bolton admits, in channelling the onrush of spectators.² How is it possible that a fashion designer could make such an impact in the museum/art world? New York City was quick to capitalize on the controversial fame and rock star mystique that followed the artist’s suicide in early 2010. Before his untimely death at forty, McQueen’s last picture show, so to speak, was his Plato’s Atlantis collection staged at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy (October 6, 2009), hailed as the first ever runway show to be live-streamed over the internet.

Multitudes could now see McQueen’s work or read about it through all the channels available today, moving beyond the closed-circuit fashion weeks in Paris, Milan, London, Tokyo, and New York. Fashion is, of course, a very large industry, its commercial tentacles reaching into every corner of our society, but High Street is unlike haute couture or the closed circuits of our opera houses and ballet stages. Thus, who would have seen McQueen’s collaboration with French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, for example, for whom he designed the costumes in Eonnagata (2009), presented at London’s Sadler’s Wells in a dance concert created with Russell Maliphant and Robert Lepage? Or who would have seen the dazzling, Bill Viola-like image of Alla Kostromichova floating in a water tank wearing colorful, digitally-engineered prints inspired by sea creatures and moth camouflage patterns (“The Girl from Atlantis,” Vogue Nippon)?

Plato’s Atlantis combines complex fictional and cinematic references, along with dystopic philosophical undertones. It was the designer’s most futuristic digital performance and was inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Plato’s description of an island that sank into the sea, marine life, climate change, sci-fi and horror movies, art work by Ridley Scott’s special effects team for Alien, laser print technology, and more. McQueen constructed avatar-like models of animal-human-alien hybridity, somehow walking on very high armadillo shoes that had a form entirely without reference to the natural anatomy of feet. The models’ staggering movement, as I could glimpse from the film footage projected behind the mannequins in Savage Beauty’s last chamber, brilliantly white with tiles, was monitored by two cameras moving alongside the models on large robotic arms—the images thrown towards the back of the space. Here another film was projected, displaying Raquel Zimmerman writhing nakedly in desert sand, a dreaming Cleopatra succumbing to the erotic slithering of sensuous snakes over her breasts. Not even Jean-Paul Gaultier could have thought of it, despite his dabbling in perverse erotics while working with Madonna, Kylie Minogue, and Naomi Campbell, and devising his Mermaid and Frida Kahlo collections. It seems that more designers have been drawn to performance, including Hussein Chalayan, whose new dance work, Gravity Fatigue (October 2015), recently featured more than one hundred costumes at Sadler’s Wells.

Fashion’s erotic appeal is as global as is its outreach. Its techno textiles and digital imaging techniques are swiftly becoming all the rage of the new media world, with the BBC recently honoring these forays into the arena of wearables that used to be populated by sound artists, Silicon Valley computer scientists, and sports companies catering to athletics markets. Fashion’s proximity to the arts—and perhaps less acknowledged, to the theatre and...