“Birds in flight fascinate me. I admire eagles and falcons. I’m inspired by a feather but also its color, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering. It’s so elaborate. In fact I try and transpose the beauty of a bird to women.”
Alexander McQueen
This is an illustration from a penny broadside, London, 1842.
The caption reads, Another dreadful suicide at the Monument.
The falling figure is Jane Cooper, a servant girl.
She was the sixth and last person to jump from the monument, erected to commemorate the Great Fire of London, 1666.
The gallery is now enclosed in an iron cage.
I took the quote from Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty, the meaty exhibition catalog to his posthumous retrospective at the Met in New York last summer. I got pushed and pulled through the stuffy airless rooms of the show with a horde of well-dressed admirers. Exactly the best way to experience the hostile talent on display. Any of the confused visitors could have been smashed flat like the woman who died under the glass door at Walmart on Black Friday.
In his writings about his work, McQueen comes across as almost servile to the women he was dressing. He was trying to help them. To better and serve them.
The gallery is now enclosed in an iron cage.
This is an illustration from a penny broadside, London, 1842.
The caption reads, Another dreadful suicide at the Monument.
The falling figure is Jane Cooper, a servant girl.
She was the sixth and last person to jump from the monument, erected to commemorate the Great Fire of London, 1666.
The gallery is now enclosed in an iron cage.