00 Marcia Michaels, Alexander McQueen, Liam Leslie, Sarah Burton, women artists
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Can art take inspiration from clothing? Alexander McQueen curates the Process exhibition

Starting from the pre fall/winter 2022 Alexander McQueen Collection, twelve female artists were invited to create an art piece inspired by the clothes

Process. An exhibition by Alexander McQueen 

In 1965 Yves Saint Laurent created the Mondrian dress, forever changing the bond between art and fashion. We are used to seeing design drawing inspiration from painting, photography, or sculpting, but seldom the opposite. What does the process of creating an art piece starting from a gown look like? 

Alexander McQueen’s creative director Sarah Burton curated an exhibition for the brand’s Mayfair store in London, where twelve women creatives could translate the message of a dress into plastic language. The artists could choose from the pre-Fall/Winter 2022 ready-to-wear collection’s breezy marine blue tones, graffiti dipped prints and you guessed it – lots of leather pieces! A romanticized grunge tone of voice like Sarah Burton has unashamedly socialized us through her gaze at the helm of Alexander Mcqueen. 

There were no limits or rules to the self-expression of each artist. Free to choose the medium, colors, and technique, the project emphasizes the meaning behind any creative process, a way to trace the development of an idea, from something intangible into a materialized form. Confiding in women from all over the world to translate the dresses into intimate works of art, Sarah Barton shifted the attention toward multicultural peculiarities and emotional intensity. More than a feminine act, the exhibition builds the space for a community where, once again, fashion can become the vehicle to unite thinking minds and storytellers. 

The artists making compelling art pieces starting from clothing

In the beginning, there was a dress. A mesmerizing nightgown is a reason for many fairytales to reflect a character transformation or a plot twist, but in the end, a dress represents the beginning of a conversation.

The process initiates the dialogue between female artists and Sarah Burton’s creative intuition for Alexander Mcqueen clothing line, a multidisciplinary and multicultural exchange of stories. The exhibition is also about giving new life to garments, reinforcing the debate on whether fashion is or isn’t a form of art. 

Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Beverly Semmes, Bingyi, Cristina de Middel, Guinevere van Seenus, Hope Gangloff, Jackie Nickerson, Jennie, Jieun Lee, Judas Companion, Marcela Correa, Marcia Kure, Marcia Michael. The artists dedicated their research to the English fashion house, delivering pieces such as face masks, paintings, sculptures, or photography series.

In conversation with Marcia Michael, the black multidisciplinary artist from England, she confessed that «Process is everything! When you look at a garment, you’re looking at a piece of art, so you can deconstruct it the same way that I would deconstruct an art piece in a gallery». For the project she created a sculpture titled Earthbound, starting from look thirty-four of the pre-fall collection, a dress irrigated by leaf motifs and glitter-covered roots over the floating tulle bottom.

For Marcia Michael, they became veins. «Especially how they were put on the dress, and the model, they stood out, and it made me think a lot about how the veins are the carrier of blood. What is blood? Blood is everything. What does blood mean? How do we connect our kinship? And their dress for me, on the model, was such a powerful structure, being a defiant woman. I fell in love with that. Being a strong woman and being able to be who you want to be».

Motherhood, commitment, and involvement 

While she fell in love with photography, Marcia Michael uses multidisciplinary art as an anthropologic method of observation and discovery. It fortified her relationship with her family and manifested as a coming of age realization in the ongoing attempt to become more aware of her role as a woman, a mother, and creator. 

«It was a way to express and find something out. For example, with my mum, we made pictures together, side by side. To understand that process, I had to go through sound, I had to go through sculpture, and video-making to understand what it was that we were doing». The British artist associates art making with motherhood, commitment, and involvement as a parallel to how she draws to personal narratives, connecting to the art piece while trying not to get stuck and separate the two personal levels.

For the Alexander McQueen Process exhibition, Marcia worked with the movement of her body, sculpting the 3D figure, leaving her imprints on the molding materials she used to cover the sculpture base. «I wanted to make sure that my presence was felt. Yeah, yeah. So when I applied the wax to the figure, you see all of my print marks. So that’s another trace. Even though I couldn’t leave my veins, I could leave my fingerprints, my marks».

Hair braidings to coronate the womanhood of ‘Earthbound’, the art piece evoked black heritage and primordial feminine motherhood energy.  «I’m taking the essence of this woman who carries everything in her veins. The dress is very powerful and very structured. I was concentrating on the breasts and the hips. On those body parts for which being a mother is significant». 

The Process exhibition becomes a tale of two worlds. Between garment making and art, the operation needs to be shared, continued, carried on, and passed through generations and cultures. It shows how by modifying an artwork, the voice of the artist prevails and remains present. 

Marcia Michaels, Alexander McQueen, Liam Leslie

Challenging the relationship between art and fashion

If brands can make collaborations to empower each other and thrive on mediatic communication, why shouldn’t art benefit from the same exposure through the platform of fashion design?

The Process exhibition is about the voice of female artists in the contemporary scene. Through this operation, Sarah Burton claims her status in the design world. The collaboration involved London-based label owner Judas Companion, who imagines wearable structures. With mask creation, she plasticizers painting and film

while «visualizing a transformation process». Other artists like Jackie Nickerson challenge the urgency of pollution by using recyclable wrapping paper and algae to suggest the contrast between the aquaculture philosophy and the traces of carbon footprints in a capitalized environment. Her photographs draw from multiple inspirations, including Alexander McQueen’s bound with nature and Sarah Burton’s «soft armor for women» silhouettes.

Being a woman no longer necessarily means being a wife

«Some walls are not political because they do not separate people, but simply create a new space that hides and eventually protects those who enter». Coming from Bahia, Brasil, Cristina de Middel is a documentary-oriented photographer, debating domestic borders in the Process hacking operation. She addresses the idealized image of women often intersected with the housewife figure «when being a woman no longer necessarily means being a wife and when a house can be fine even without being someone’s home». 

Curator, academic, designer, architect, and cultural activist, Bingyi is a Chinese artist from Beijing, who navigates the many layers of creation. She imagined a wedding dress that would flow away from the bride’s body culminating in a performative act of undressing. As she walks the altar, the gown would gradually decompose leaving only the underwear in sight. This time composing a ceramic sculpture base with different materials, Jannie Jieun Lee starts with a red leather slip dress, hoping to «evoke the emotions felt by the woman who wears this garment in the moments of her life». 

Also coming from New York, USABeverly Semmes is an artist untangling the questions around the female body representation in mediatic culture, while Hope Gangloff is recognized for her brightly colored portraits. «When the McQueen studio contacted me about this project, I wanted to paint my friend and neighbor, the artist Caitlin MacQueen,» she says.

Guinevere van Seenus, Ann Cathrin November Høibo,  Marcia Kure fulfills and Marcela Correa

The still-life scenes she depicts are a catalyst between the McQueen dark denim dress she chose and the color palette she uses. The model Guinevere van Seenus creates images as well, but she relies on photography, the word substitute she finds most fitting for expression: «I work alone and try to make friends with the accidents that happen with the film and the Polaroid».

‌Ann Cathrin November Høibo comes from Kristiansand, Norway. She was the only one to choose to wave as a means to interpret the Alexander McQueen pre-fall womenswear 22 collection. Opting for pink and red, colors most associated with femininity, her piece is «based on my changing moods and the train of my thoughts, from day to day, a bit like dressing up».

The Nigerian multifaceted artist Marcia Kure fulfills the exhibition through a series of elements representative of her culture and roots. More than the dress she thinks of the body. How does it communicate and speak up today and throughout history?

An artwork about power systems, migration, and commerce, the Amina Project collects eighteen sculptures crafted from relics and artifacts evoking death. Working with sculpting as well as Marcela Correa is a Chile-based artist choosing to convert a princess yellow long gown into three-dimensional collages where she used glued magazines to portray a humanized face. 

Process by Alexander McQueen

Showcasing how creativity arises from infinite perspectives, Alexander McQueen invites a group of twelve artists to express their vision by drawing inspiration from the women’s Fall/Winter 2022 pre-collection. Each artist chose a look from the collection, from which they were inspired by expressing themselves through their favorite channel and establishing a creative dialogue with the Maison.

Maria Hristina Agut

The writer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article.

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