The Museum of Savage Beauty: Bag

Museum Technician Phil Sofer explains the complexities of mounting this unique object for display in the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty Bag. In Memory of Elizabeth How, Salem 1692, Autumn/Winter 2007 http://www.vam.ac.uk/museumofsavagebeauty/ Transcript: My name’s Phil Sofer, I’m a museum technician in the Technical Services Department at the V&A, and my role on the McQueen exhibition is to work on mounting all the objects and accessories in the cabinet of curiosities section. I picked this orb bag to talk about because the first time I saw it I just thought it was a really interesting object. It’s quite an unusual piece but a lot of the McQueen pieces that are coming in for the exhibition are unusual, you know, and present their own challenges. When I first started looking at how to mount this object, I looked at the photography that had been done for the publication to accompany the exhibition. And the objects…there’s another bag in the show, a red Fabergé egg bag, and they’re photographed so that they’re, like, suspending in space. So I thought I’d try and mount these objects in the same way. And looking at this object it’s actually, it actually has quite a bit of weight to it so where it would be quite simple to suspend that object simply from the leather strap, it was important from a conservation point of view that it’s weight is supported for the duration of the exhibition, so that there’s not that weight pulling down on the leather strap for the durati