If you have time to spare before (or after) you visit "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" at London's V&A and you would like to see at least one menswear design by McQueen, head to the museum's Fashion Gallery (Room 40).
This space was renovated a few years ago and, while some sections look as if they already need a little bit of refurbishing, the collection features some real gems including European fashion, fabrics and accessories from 1750 to the present day. The display is organised chronologically from the left to the right, around the outer circle of the gallery and, on the far right of the gallery you will find a screen printed cotton coat and a pair of rayon wool trousers designed in 1997 by Alexander McQueen.
The trousers are barely visible and aren't that interesting, but the coat features a section (printed in reverse - is that for copyright reasons?) of Hans Memling's monumental triptych "The Last Judgment", painted between 1467 and 1471 and commissioned by Angelo di Jacopo Tani, the Florentine manager of the Medici bank in Bruges.
The central panel of this painting shows Christ sitting on top of a rainbow in judgment of the world while demons and angels battle below over the souls of the damned. On the left panel the righteous souls are ushered towards St Peter who guides them to Heaven, while in the central section the armor-clad Archangel Michael weighs souls and drives the damned towards Hell, on the right side of the triptych.
There is something quite interesting about this painting and McQueen's design: this work of art is considered as one of the major "Flemish primitive" works (a term that describes artists who worked in Holland and Belgium from the beginning of the 15th century through to the middle of the 16th century) along with other works such as "The Portinari Triptych" by Hugo Van der Goes, "The Deposition of the Cross" by Rogier Van der Weyden and "The Last Supper" by Bouts.
McQueen created this design in 1997, but, in his final and unfinished collection posthumously showcased in March 2010, there is one gown with a print of the "Portinari Triptych".
Gold is the main shade of that collection and feathers are one of the main materials, in the same way as gold is the colour of Saint Michael's suit of armour (McQueen also had a fascination with armours and their functions of protecting and reshaping the body) and his wings end in peacock feathers, while the sinner in St. Michael's right-hand scale pan is a donor portrait of Tommaso Portinari. In a nutshell, it was almost as if, for that last collection, McQueen went back to specific paintings he had firmly in his mind and to an arty passion he had discovered many years before, the Flemish masters.
As he stated indeed in a 2003 interview on Harper's & Queen: "I relate more to that cold, austere asceticism of the Flemish masters, and I also love the macabre thing you see in Tudor and Jacobean portraiture."
A further walk around the gallery will lead you to discover further connections between the garments in the museum collection and McQueen: one cabinet displays for example a jacquard woven silk bodice and uncut length of dress fabric (from 1865) and a sprung steel crinoline covered with wool and linen (from 1860-65), that may have played a role in the construction, decorative patterns and embroideries for some of the designs by McQueen that guaranteed him fashion eternity and that are currently part of "Savage Beauty".
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