Sally Grant

McQueen

Film review for Australian Book Review Arts, September 2018

In old interview footage included in the documentary McQueen, the late British designer Lee Alexander McQueen states, ‘If you want to know me, just look at my work.’ Relatively few had the privilege of seeing his extraordinary designs on the runway firsthand. Many more got to witness the results of his impeccable craftsmanship and raw, romantic vision at Savage Beauty, the landmark exhibition presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2015. With this new documentary, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui provide another, more far-reaching opportunity to view McQueen’s work, but also to learn that bit more about Lee McQueen, the man whose imaginative genius revolutionised the fashion industry. …

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Exhibition review for Australian Book Review Arts, May 2018

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest blockbuster, is dazzling. Organised by Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the museum’s Costume Institute, the exhibition brings together contemporary fashion designs with the imagery of the Roman Catholic Church by which they were inspired. …