With the V&A’s all-singing, all-dancing ‘Savage Beauty’ exhibition attracting the likes of Kate Moss and the Beckhams, Tate Britain’s contribution to ‘season Alexander McQueen’ is a sobering companion piece. From Clerkenwell studio start to Paris catwalk finish, photographer Nick Waplington documented team McQueen over six months, as they devised ‘The Horn of Plenty! (Everything But the Kitchen Sink)’ – the notoriously guarded fashion designer’s last Autumn/Winter show. A hundred large-scale prints represent a selection from the wider book project, ‘Working Progress’, completed by Waplington and McQueen three months before the designer’s suicide in 2009.
Returning to previous silhouettes and patterns, for A/W09 McQueen took on ‘recycling’ as a guiding theme. Waplington captures the studio’s many mood boards and fabric samples, candy and cigarettes, young interns, older seamstresses and ageless models. There is stuff everywhere. Interspersed among these photos are close-up shots of landfill sites: newspapers, plastic bags, beer bottles – yet more stuff everywhere. This trashiness guides McQueen’s designs: Coke-can headdresses, ‘plastic surgery’ makeup, and a ‘bin bag’ dress made of the finest silk. The photos are beguiling and impeccably composed. It all reads as exquisite satire.
For those familiar with McQueen’s work, these images will be brimming with signifiers. For those not au fait, the show offers an entrancing journey from creative inception to final presentation. Known for his depictions of class dynamics, Waplington was a good fit for the Lewisham-born McQueen, who never wore the role of refined couturier. But process isn’t disclosure, and despite the camera’s proximity, what we see is a world of work – a story of creation, consumption and destruction. We are left firmly, perhaps unavoidably, outside McQueen’s troubled mind.
Ananda Pellerin