The McQueen restrospective opens at the Met’s Costume Institute May 4th and I hope I can make it over to the east coast before July 31st to see it.  They will be showing work from his post-graduate collection of 1992 on, which would be very interesting to see, and being able to see the cloth and stitching and draping and folding in person would send shivers down my spine!  To get myself even more excited I went through what I could find online of his past collections (thanks syle.com!) Despite poor image quality of some of the older ones that are online, it is cool to see how many themes and inspirations carry forward into future collections and mutate into something even deeper and more distilled. For example, the Byzantine inspiration from Fall 2003 is pretty good (about the level that most other runway designers are at right now) but what it’s become in his posthumous Fall 2010 collection is nothing short of divine. I know I am gushing about McQueen again, and I did so when he was alive as well, but no other fashion designer approached the artistry, showmanship, or the absolute mastery of the craft that he displayed.

-Claudia