Alexander McQueen’s Retrospective bows at the Met.

While Russia’s Pushkin Museum has the Inspiration Dior exhibit, New York not wanting to be outdone has the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty exhibit.

The exhibition features about 100 pieces from McQueen’s London archive and the Paris archives of Givenchy as well from the late Isabella Blow’s wardrobe, which Daphne Guinness bought last year and loaned to the museum. It opens with two looks from McQueen’s spring 2001 “Voss” collection: a dress from ostrich feathers and painted red medical slides and another dripping in razor-clam shells.

Alexander McQueen challenged normative conventions of beauty. (Double-click to Enlarge photos)

McQueen’s challenge of traditional ideas of beauty is as renown as his mastery of craftsmanship and the drama of his garments and runway spectacles. The exhibit marries these notions seamlessly in its exploration of the complex and creative world of the designer, who took his own life in February 2010. It addresses the themes that informed McQueen’s work including life and death, gender and sexuality and race and religion, as well as a reverence for 19th-century romanticism and an irreverent hand with fashion convention. The exhibit also highlights plenty of examples of McQueen’s most famous runway moments, from the fall 2003 billowing cape shown in an artificial wind tunnel to the spray-painted, white cotton muslin dress worn by Shalom Harlow from spring 1999 and a miniature version of the Kate Moss hologram that ended his fall 2006 show.

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