Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty retrospective to open in London next year

Seminal designer's life's work to be exhibited at London's V&A museum

A cubic snow-globe surrounding an ice-rink; a chess-board demarcated with squares of light; a rubbish-heap surrounded by shattered mirror. Not Kubrickian cinematic set-pieces – although, come to think of it, they kind of ended up being. But their original intention was to backdrop fashion shows, shows devised and staged by Lee Alexander McQueen over the course of a career spanning almost 20 years.

“He loved the element of surprise,” says his long-term collaborator Sam Gainsbury of those famous and frequently infamous mise-en-scènes. “He also liked that people wanted to know what he was doing each season: ‘What do you think McQueen’s doing, what do you think Lee’s doing?’”

Savage Beauty, the blockbuster exhibition originally staged at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now slated to open to the public at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in March 2015, seeks to recapture a slither of that breathless enthusiasm and anticipation, not least by keeping the specifics of the majority of its exhibits and plans under wraps.

A preview earlier this week showcased a clutch of instantly-recognisable clothing - a pointed-shouldered jacket splashed with Christian Renaissance imagery from McQueen’s brutal nineties years; a romantic billowing gown from 2006’s The Widows of Culloden; a crystal-crusted bell-shaped dress from one of his final shows, titled Natural Dis-Tinction Un-Natural Selection.

Those are the pieces we are familiar with: 30 new garments are set to be added to the show, lent by private individuals and collectors such as Katy England and Annabelle Neilson, as well as pieces from the Isabella Blow Collection. There will also be an entirely new section devoted, appropriately enough, to McQueen’s work in London. McQueen staged a decade of shows in the capital, including some of his most memorable.

That pointy-shouldered jacket comes from a collection McQueen called It’s A Jungle Out There, models walking between flaming cars in an industrial space in King’s Cross, the collection inspired by the designer’s savaging by critics when he first joined the house of Givenchy (McQueen headed the label from 1997-2001). Another in 1997 soaked models with a downpour of artificial rain, while a year later model Shalom Harlow was painted by a pair of robots normally used to spray car chassis. The latter was the only one of his shows ever to make McQueen cry.

The “London” gallery will contain work pulled from McQueen’s first seven shows – which erred on the side of the savage, rather than the beautiful. Despite their still-striking cut and silhouettes, McQueen was undoubtedly out to shock in those early shows – shows where models were wrapped in sellotape and imprinted with tyre-tracks, where a transparent plastic bodice pressing live tape-worms against a model’s bare skin, or dresses were slashed and tattered as if the models were victims of unspeakable atrocities. Or, perhaps, the perpetrators: there was rarely anything weak or overpowered about McQueen’s women, and certainly nothing about his work as a whole.

“Lee was a genius,” said Sarah Burton, his former right-hand woman and the talent now tasked with guiding the McQueen label following his death in 2010. “A true visionary who pushed boundaries, challenged and inspired. He believed in creativity and innovation and his talent was limitless.”

Indeed, that's part of the challenge of this exhibition, curated by Claire Wilcox, Senior Curator of Fashion at the V&A, alongside consultant curator Andrew Bolton of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who devised the original exhibition. Gainsbury, a collaborator of McQueen since 1994, acts as creative director. The main difficulty faced is in boiling down McQueen’s life’s work – almost 20 years, under two labels – into an exhibition that takes hours, rather than days, to navigate. The New York installation broke records, and became one of the most-viewed Met exhibitions ever. The V&A incarnation has already sold 16,000 tickets, although the show does not open for almost six months.

What does the British leg of the exhibition promise then? Plenty of breath-taking theatrical moments, for which McQueen gained such international repute: a life-sized hologram of Kate Moss, a ghostly apparition originally presented for McQueen’s autumn/winter 2006 show, is a major component.

However, as with McQueen’s shows, the clothes hold the real power, and are the real draw. There will be more than 200 ensembles and accessories on display when the V&A throw open the doors to Savage Beauty, the largest number of pieces created by McQueen and his collaborators ever seen together, ranging from his 1992 Central Saint Martin’s MA show through to the autumn/winter 2010 collection, Angels and Demons, presented posthumously after McQueen’s suicide.

A life, through work. That’s what Savage Beauty will really show to UK audiences. That’s why it’s worth seeing.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, in partnership with Swarovski, supported by American Express and made possible with the co-operation of Alexander McQueen, runs from 14 March to 19 July 2015 at the Victoria and Albert Museum.