Adele Tutter’s essay, Gorgeous Metamporphoses: Alexander McQueen and Francesca Woodman, brings together the work of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), seen recently at a massively attended exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), who will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition opening in San Francisco in November and traveling to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum next March. She finds more commonality between these romantic figures than the mere coincidence of a goth aesthetic and their youthful suicides. Rebecca Park, meanwhile, offers a rare dissenting review of the massively popular and critically acclaimed McQueen extravaganza, from a feminist but also from a museological perspective. “Savage Beauty ultimately disappoints not because Alexander McQueen turned violence towards women into a stylish spectacle, but rather because of the Metropolitan’s unwillingness to expose and flesh out this dynamic.”
