Alexander McQueen at the Met

It's hard to say what's been more talked about this summer, the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met or the lines to get in. Stretching around the top floor and down the central staircase, with wait times of, roughly, three hours, getting in to see the exhibit requires stamina, reading material, and PowerBars. (Or a membership: sorry to rub it in, but we only waited about 15 minutes.) In any case, it's worth it. Absolutely.

The show brings together pieces from McQueen's many collections, beginning with the bumsters that made his name in the early 1990s through the ephemeral Kate Moss hollogram dress and concluding with the printed spandex-like dresses that showed around the time he killed himself in 2010. Idiosyncratically decorated rooms, including one with burnished mirrors and a soundtrack of howling wolves, highlight the masterful narratives McQueen constructed: the rape of Scotland by England, the tendency of fashion to exoticize and festishize the clothes of other cultures, the beauty and terror of nature. This is an exhibit that lives up to the ambition of its subject: "When I'm dead and gone," he once said, "people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen."

Photos: Sølve Sundsbø / Art + Commerce
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