"I was like a wild child when I got to Swarovski. I wanted to have everything, to touch everything. And I don't just want to use crystal - I want to invent something new, " Alexander McQueen stated in 1998 after a trip to Swarovski's headquarters in Austria.
Swarovski is one of the partners of the exhibition "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" (on until today at the V&A) that includes over 20 crystal embellished pieces designed by McQueen in collaboration with the company.
Swarovski first sponsored McQueen's "No. 13" (S/S 1999) collection and, from then on, the designer kept on collaborating with the company creating tops made entirely from strands of crystal chain ("Eshu", A/W 2000), heavily beaded gowns, jumpsuits and thigh-high crystal boots ("Deliverance", S/S 2004), while working with Shaun Leane and Philip Treacy on gemstone encrusted headpieces.
To celebrate this connection, Swarovski launched a project with ten students from the third year BA Jewellery Design course at Central Saint Martins, asking them to design pieces inspired by McQueen's main themes and by the exhibition at the V&A.
Though the display in Room 25 at the V&A (in May) didn't really make them justice (showing the creations flat and under glass cases with no explanations about how they were going to be worn wasn't the best choice...), the results were imaginative, theatrical and at times pretty disturbing.
Fetishism prevailed in Akiko Shinzato's bejewelled vegetable tanned leather mask with a fixed clownish smile that hides the wearer's identity.
History appeared to be the main references in Kota Okuda's tam o'shanter leather bonnet. MCQueen-wise the latter was directly linked to the "Highland Rape" collection and combined traditional dress and modes of adornment with the fractured colonial landscape and with contemporary issues of identity.
McQueen was fascinated by hybrid creatures and at times he came up with designs that transformed women in aggressive birds. Karen Leung tackled this theme in her wearable claws made with polyester cord and with traditional basket weaving techniques.
Also Dennis Song's feral neckpiece seemed to move from this theme: inspired by McQueen's "Voss" collection, the designer also tried to embody through this creation an intangible concept – human desire. Song's huge tentacle-like claws with sharp nails are indeed designed to sit around the neck and shoulder area and strangle, eat and consume the wearer.
Fiona Kakei Chong looked at the integration of natural materials in her piece: McQueen's "Savage Beauty" includes a razor clam dress and, in Chong's wig-like porcelain, nylon, silver, leather and gemstones headdress the designer used seashells as body adornment drawing from ancient Roman hairstyles and tribal adornments.
Architecture was also indirectly tackled: Birgit Toke Tauka Frietman responded to McQueen's dichotomic elements (soft Vs rigid; fragile Vs hard...), with a black walnut and suede shield-like piece that protects and exposes the wearer's body thanks to its large silhouette integrating crystals within a laser-cut pattern and guaranteeing in this way lightness and elegance.
Jessica Pass's angular neckpiece structure also had something architectural about it, and juxtaposed delicate pheasant feathers to a strong and heavy foldable structure.
Architecture-wise, Xinyu Wang's design was probably the most striking: Wang recreated a sort of camera view finder with four sparkling corners that frame the head and the face of the wearer, highlighting and attracting attention to these areas like McQueen's headpieces used to do.
Future was another theme on the mind of some of the students: McQueen's "Plato's Atlants" inspired Juliette van de Kerchove's nude pink collar, envisaged as a response to the way the human body adapts to the changes in the physical environment.
Charlotte Asherson was inspired by McQueen's S/S 2009 collection "Natural Dis-tinction Un-natural Selection" and by the dawn of the industrial age and came up with a transparent PVC cape covered in marlstone elements, nuts, screws and crystals.
In his "Natural Dis-tinction Un-natural Selection" collection McQueen stated that he had employed cystals in pieces such as his Bell Jar Dress to "hint to a more optimistic vision of where we are today". While the projects by the students involved in this project were quite intriguing, they all tended to look at the most bizarre, dramatic and fetishistic aspects of McQueen's practice. In a nutshell, that tiny glimpse of optimism that McQueen was craving for was exactly what was missing in these pieces.
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