LONDON (AP) – “Savage Beauty,” the blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibition first staged in New York, is coming home to London.
The city’s Victoria and Albert Museum on Thursday unveiled its much-anticipated tribute to the late British fashion designer, who dazzled the industry with his creative talent and provocative designs before committing suicide in 2010.
The V&A described the new show as a “homecoming” for the designer, who was born and trained in London and often took inspiration from the British capital. The museum was also a fitting host for the retrospective: As a young fashion student, McQueen studied its archives and once said it was “the sort of place I’d like to be shut in overnight.”
The exhibition is an expanded version of the 2011 show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which drew hundreds of thousands and became one of the most popular in the museum’s history. The London show includes a new section focusing on McQueen’s early London collections.
The highlight is the “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a darkened room lined floor-to-ceiling with some of his most dramatic designs: The monstrous, lobster claw “armadillo shoe” worn by Lady Gaga, a metal corset with a distorted animal-like spine, and many of his terrifying, tribal-inspired spiky headdresses.