If given the chance, John Gosling would have written entirely new music. But since Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art May 4, is a retrospective of the late fashion designer’s work, it only seemed appropriate to pair the clothes in the exhibition with the music that Gosling, McQueen’s longtime music supervisor, originally played as they went down the runway.
“It was really important as a historic document, so regardless of whether some of the music is from 10 year ago and I thought I could do it better now, it’s important to keep it exactly as it was,” says Gosling, who makes electronic music under the name Mekon and used to play in the seminal experimental art-rock band Psychic TV. “I could write music for that exhibition all day long, but it’s important to see it exactly as it was. I think it hangs together better for that, to be presented exactly how he wanted it.
Alexander McQueen
So the 100 or so outfits and assorted other ephemera collected from McQueen’s 19 years as a cutting-edge fashion designer are encased in a sort of sonic resin. A Bjork song, “Frosti,” plays alongside dresses in the “Romantic Exoticism” galleries, which features a number of notable McQueen pieces, including those from his 2005 fashion show staged as a chess game. And in another room a three-minute version of “Atlantis,” a longer piece that Gosling composed with industrial music legend Raymond Watts, sits in the air while museum goers take in McQueen’s spring and summer 2010 “Plato’s Atlantis” collection. When visitors stop to admire a hologram of Kate Moss that was part of the Fall/Winter 2006 runway show, the haunting music is perfectly suited yet somehow familiar. It’s John Williams’ theme from Schindler’s List.
“He would take something from pop culture and pair it with an image you wouldn’t expect and it would totally change your feeling about that music,” says Gosling. “I remember there being a lot of opposition to that, but he stuck to his guns. He wouldn’t tell people his plan until the last moment so they couldn’t talk him out of it.”
The fact that music was so important to McQueen—“There was lots of back and forth, far more than you would do normally”—whose shows were famous for going beyond the boring old model-trots-runway formula, made the posthumous celebration that much more affecting, says Gosling. “It’s very strange going back and finding all of the pieces of music. I hadn’t looked at those things in however long and it was very weird, very evocative.”
