Thurman is a master fashion writer. “Darkness Wearable” is one of her best pieces. It’s a review of a 2011 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum called Savage Beauty – a retrospective of Alexander McQueen’s two decades in fashion. Thurman writes,
Even if you never bother with fashion shows, go to this one. It has more in common with “Sleep No More,” the “immersive” performance of “Macbeth” currently playing in Chelsea, than it does with a conventional display of couture in a gallery, tent, or shop window. Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, has assembled a hundred ensembles and seventy accessories, mostly from the runway, with a few pieces of couture that McQueen designed at Givenchy, and he gives their history and psychology an astute reading. McQueen was an omnivore (literally so; he always struggled with his weight), and the richness of his work reflects a voracious consumption of high and low culture. He felt an affinity with the Flemish masters, Gospel singing, Elizabethan theatre and its cross-dressing heroines (a line from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was tattooed on his right biceps), contemporary performance art, punk, Surrealism, Japan, the ancient Yoruba, and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In most particulars, however—including his death—he was an archetypal Romantic.
Her description of the show is superb. For example:
Alienation often accounts for a macabre sense of the marvellous. At the entrance to “Savage Beauty,” there is an evening gown conjured entirely from razor-clam shells. Antelope horns sprout from the shoulders of a pony-skin jacket, and vulture skulls serve as epaulettes on a leather dress. There are angel wings made out of balsa wood, and worms encased in a bodice of molded plastic. “I’m inspired by a feather,” McQueen said of all the duck, turkey, ostrich, and gull plumage in his clothing—“its graphics, its weightlessness, and its engineering.” One of his most demented masterpieces is a glossy black-feathered body cast that transforms its wearer into a hybrid creature—part raptor, part waterfowl, and part woman.
And:
The second gallery is an ornate, spooky hall of mirrors consecrated to McQueen’s gothic reveries about bondage and fetishism. One of the loveliest dresses—with a lampshade skirt of swagged jet beading—has a necrotic-looking jabot of lace ivy that reminds you what a fetish mourning was to the Victorians. Leather abounds, masterfully tortured into submission, as in a zippered sheath with fox sleeves latticed by an elaborate harness.
And:
Beyond the hall of mirrors is a “Cabinet of Curiosities,” where inventive instruments of consensual torture in the form of jewelry, headgear, footwear, and corsets are displayed like talismans. Videos from selected runway shows flicker high on the black walls, and the animal sounds of a cheering crowd and a woman moaning issue from hidden speakers. In a clip from one of McQueen’s most radical collections (Spring/Summer 1999), an homage to the German artist Rebecca Horn, the model Shalom Harlow revolves on a turntable, cringing in mock horror as two menacing robots spray her white parachute dress with paint guns. The most striking artifact from this collection is a pair of exquisitely hand-carved high-heeled wooden prostheses that McQueen designed for Aimee Mullins, a bilateral amputee and American Paralympic athlete. She modelled them on the runway with a bridal lace skirt and a centurion’s breastplate of molded leather, sutured like Frankenstein’s skull.
And then there’s this extraordinary passage:
In “Highland Rape” (1995), the breakthrough collection that earned McQueen, at twenty-six, his notoriety as a bad-boy wonder, bare-breasted dishevelled girls staggered down the runway in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty tartan, and distressed leather.
You can tell from the piquancy of Thurman’s descriptions that she relishes McQueen’s “macabre sense of the marvelous.” It’s her sensibility, too.
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