Figure 2

Left: Manuel Cipriano Gomes Mafra, Urn, circa 1865-1887, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Barbara Barbara and Marty Frenkel, photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Right: Alexander McQueen, Women’s Ensemble (detail) from Plato’s Atlantis Collection, Spring/Summer 2010, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift from the Regina J. Drucker Collection, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

[1] Exhibition catalogue, 161.

Figure 3

Installation view of two dresses from the Plato’s Atlantis collection (Spring/Summer 2010), a large oval rustic dish (France, c. 1600-50) with a snake design, and Manuel Cipriano Gomes Mafra’s earthenware urn (c. 1865-87), which is adorned with a three-dimensional frog and lizard. Photo: MNBAQ. Denis Legendre.

[2] Clarissa M. Esguerra and Michaela Hansen, “Introduction,” in Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind Mythos Muse, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023), 11.

[3] Caroline Evans, “Desire and Dread: Alexander McQueen and the Contemporary Femme Fatale,” in Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Body Dressing (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 202.

[4] Quoted in ibid.

[5] Quoted in ibid.

[6] Ibid., 206.

[7] Ibid., 206-207.

[8] Alexander McQueen, Woman’s Dress, from the Untitled (Angels and Demons) collection, Fall/Winter 2010-2011. Exhibition catalogue, 27.

[9] The photographs were digitally composited and woven in jacquard.

[10] Erin Sullivan Maynes, “Envy (Invidia),” in exhibition catalogue, 28.

The exhibition does an excellent job of illuminating the wide range of visual influences on McQueen’s body of work, displaying, for instance, nine aquatints from the LACMA collection by Pablo Picasso from 1959 that depict bull fighting, and an etching of the same subject by Francisco de Goya entitled A Spanish Knight Kills the Bull after Having Lost His Horse (1816, LACMA), in a room dedicated to McQueen’s bull fighting collection, The Dance of the Twisted Bull (Spring/Summer 2002).

Given that curators and museum scholars are increasingly asking how to decolonize the museum, I consider and critique the second room of the exhibition (Fashioned Narratives) through a postcolonial lens. This room includes the forementioned Scottish-influenced outfits, but also a white fur ensemble (Scanners collection, Fall/Winter 2003–2024; Figure 6) influenced by Siberian clothing, and a kimono-inspired jacket that could be described as chinoiserie and categorized as cultural appropriation (Scanners collection), regardless of McQueen’s intentions to celebrate Siberian innovation for cold weather and Japanese textiles, respectively. McQueen envisioned Scanners as a journey across Siberia and Tibet that ended in Japan.[11] The curators in Quebec have presented these two outfits alongside an Inuit coat (amauti) by Nelly Putuguk and Siupi Junanasialuk (made in Nunavik in 1950 with caribou skin, ringed seal skin, glass beads, lead, tin, and ivory) and Asian textiles such as two green brocade (Kati Rimo) temple hangings produced in seventeenth-century Tibet in order to counter-act the culturally appropriative nature of McQueen’s designs.[12] However, the temple hangings raise the question of whether this kind of religious material culture should be exhibited in a western museum at all. In the same room are two dresses (Figure 7 and Figure 8) from the Fall/Winter 2007–2008 collection In Memory of Elizabeth How, Salem, 1692, which are complemented by two remarkable woodcuts by German artist Ernst Barlach that were inspired by Goethe’s Faust, including one entitled Witch’s Ride (1922, published in 1923, LACMA).

figure 6

Woman’s ensemble (coat and skirt) from the Scanners collection (Fall/Winter 2003-4). Photo by author.

[11] Exhibition catalogue, 67.

[12] Anne Anlin Cheng addresses McQueen’s appropriation of Asian textiles and dress in her book Ornamentalism. See Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 88-96.

Figure 7

Woman’s dress made with silk satin and glass beads from the In Memory of Elizabeth How, Salem, 1692 collection (Fall/Winter 2007-8). Photo by author.

figure 8

Woman’s dress made with silk velvet and glass beads from the In Memory of Elizabeth How, Salem, 1692 collection (Fall/Winter 2007-8). Photo by author.

One critique regarding the exhibition centers on this particular room: why combine Siberian- and Japanese-influenced clothing across from clothes inspired by the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century, and next to Scottish-inspired ensembles from the Widows of Culloden collection (Fall/Winter 2006–2007)? McQueen was critical of colonialism and imperialism, which inspired several of his collections including The Widows of Culloden and The Girl Who Lived in the Tree (Fall/Winter 2008–2009).[13] Clarissa M. Esguerra and Michaela Hansen remark in the exhibition catalogue’s introduction that “it can be challenging to immediately differentiate the superficial appropriation of culture for commercial gain from cultural exchange or inspiration as a mode of appreciation of storytelling,” but they also acknowledge that “though [McQueen’s] intentions were to celebrate dress and culture outside his own, he lacked personal intimacy with the subject matter.”[14] The curatorial framework could be further fleshed out by pointing to the fact that all of these groups of people have been, at one time or another, pathologized and violently eradicated due to misogyny, racism, and xenophobia.

The third room (Technique and Innovation) includes clothing inspired by a wide range of historical references including Renaissance, Flemish and Dutch Old Master paintings,[15] and the Roaring Twenties. The accompanying artworks include historical dress, as well as a large portrait of a flapper, Emmanuel Fougerat’s Mrs. Frank Ethelort McKenna, née Yvonne Pérodeau (1924, MNBAQ), which is positioned next to one of the dresses with which I opened this review. The grey-green, sequined garment with rows of tulle in lace is from the What a Merry Go Round collection (Fall/Winter 2001–2002; Figure 9).

figure 9

Woman’s dress made with polyamide net, plastic sequins and silk and metallic-thread lace from the What a Merry Go Round collection (Fall/Winter 2001-2). Photo by author.

[13] Esquerra and Hansen, “Introduction,” 13-14.

[14] Ibid., 14.

[15] Ibid., 13.

figure 10

Woman’s red-and-black silk damask dress from The Horn of Plenty collection (Fall/Winter 2009-10). Photo by author.

The vestibule before the fourth and final room (Evolution and Existence), which includes the dresses from the Plato’s Atlantis collection (the premise of which was a post-global warming scenario in which humanity has been forced to adapt and survive underwater), displays McQueen’s outfits from The Dance of the Twisted Bull collection (Spring/Summer 2002). Just before that vestibule are a series of dresses including a deceptively simple black, long-sleeved dress superimposed by the shimmering face of McQueen’s muse Isabella Blow who died by suicide in 2007 (La Dame Bleue collection, Spring/Summer 2008), and the red, silk damask dress with the black bird motif (designed by Simon Ungless) from The Horn of Plenty collection (Fall/Winter 2009–2010; Figure 10), which critiqued overconsumption. The title of the collection also refers to the name of the pub where Jack the Ripper’s final victim was last seen.16 Next to that dress (the one that I would have worn home if I had my druthers), is an interesting contemporary work by the art group BGL entitled Good Night Darthy (2006, MNBAQ), which is a painted aluminum and plastic work positioned on the floor that appears to be the melted body of Darth Vader, part of his helmet still intact.

There is something for everyone in this exhibition, assuming that everyone loves McQueen’s clothing as much as I do. There are historical paintings and contemporary multimedia artworks. There are glazed earthenware urns and platters decorated with snakes, dresses inspired by eighteenth-century aristocrats, and photographs of models wearing McQueen’s clothes before and after his fashion shows. There is also a photograph of McQueen himself wearing a purple outfit (sans the head) that looks like a mascot costume. He is smiling at the camera, but we know, in hindsight, that McQueen had his demons. As a feminist art historian, I often caution my students to be wary of the phrase “great artist,” but I am one hundred per cent comfortable describing McQueen as a great artist, whose death robbed us of future masterpieces.

[16] Jack the Ripper was the inspiration for McQueen’s first collection. Exhibition catalogue, 133.

Dr. Julia Skelly is a specialist in nineteenth-century British art, queer/feminist art, ethics and photography, global contemporary art, craft, textiles, excess, decadence, and addiction.

Her publications include Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751-1919 (Ashgate, 2014), The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (Ashgate, 2014), Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Skin Crafts: Affect, Violence and Materiality in Global Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2022). Skelly’s next book, Intersecting Threads: Cloth in Contemporary Queer, Feminist and Anti-Racist Art, is under advance contract with Bloomsbury Academic. Skelly is Assistant Professor (LTA) in the Department of Art History at Concordia University.