Around Christmas, Sarah Burton and her team at McQueen sent images of this released-today pre-collection to 12 women artists, along with a proposal. The artists were asked to select any and as many items in the collection as they liked to use as a starting point for a McQueen-commissioned piece of art. Today the results were installed in the brand’s Bond Street flagship, alongside the collection itself. As Burton said via press release: “I wanted to engage in a new creative dialogue with the collection this season and see how the artists interpreted the work that we created in the studio. It’s been very interesting to see how creativity has sprung from so many different perspectives, and the outcomes that have been varied and beautiful.”
How we respond to art is as subjective as our response to dress: the pieces I personally would most have liked to hang in my living room include Hope Gangloff’s portrait of her serendipitously named friend Caitlin MacQueen wearing the patched denim dress of look 16, Marcia Kure’s painting and fascinator installation The Amina Project that sprung from the look 30 dress featuring the McQueen studio teams’ initials embroidered in crystal and silver on Chantilly lace, and Beverly Semmes’s simultaneously funny and fascinating piece Marigold, which blew up the exploded neckline marigold corset dress of look 1 into a physical manifestation of a psychological state (featuring a Labrador).
These and the nine other also-excellent pieces will remain on display in London for at least a further fortnight before going on tour to other McQueen locations yet to be confirmed. As a collaborative device, the project was a neat way of interrogating through adjacency the established hierarchy of artforms (which for reasons that for sure involve sexism place fashion very low), while emphasizing female dialogue, community, and expression.
What would be especially fascinating to see is a development of this artistic dialogue into a fully-fledged conversation, with Burton and her team working to interpret elements of the art—such as The Amina Project’s stormy canvas and artist Ann Cathrin November Høibo’s moody tapestry—into future pieces. But even as a one-off experiment, this was an interesting twist.
