The Museum of Savage Beauty: Top

V&A Curator of Photographs Susanna Brown discusses the use of photography in Alexander McQueen's work. Top. Joan, Autumn/Winter 1998 Transcript: The medium of photography played a really crucial role in McQueen’s creative process. He worked very closely with contemporary photographers on shoots but he also had a great knowledge of the history of the medium and was inspired to a great extent by photographic images in his own collection and in the books that he owned. He collected some fantastic photographs, which were hung and displayed with great sensitivity in his own home. Moreover, photographic images often provided the starting point for his spectacular catwalk presentations. I suppose that VOSS, the presentation in 2001, would be the clearest example of that. The starting point for that theatrical show was a famous photograph called Sanitarium by Joel-Peter Witkin. The object that I’d like to talk a bit more now is one of many examples from McQueen’s career in which photographs, either historic or modern, were printed on garments often in very experimental and complex ways. He first began experimenting with photographic print techniques in 1996 for the collection, Dante, which featured photographs by his friend and one of the World’s most famous war photographers, Don McCullin; images made in Vietnam, as well as 19th century photographs from a colony for the blind. This garment – a cotton and sequin T-shirt – is from a collection in 1998 called Joan. The starting poi