Rendez-vous installation view
Since the death of designer Alexander McQueen, his public persona as British l’enfant terrible has occupied the central narrative of his legacy. McQueen, known as “Lee” to his friends, played the provocateur, and he was both loved and reviled for it. When he spoke publicly, he only added to the mythos: “If I make mistakes, they come from the heart,” he told Purple magazinein 2007. “I don’t care. This is what is going to make me happy. If people don’t like it, well, that’s the way it is.”
But to his friend and longtime photographer Ann Ray, McQueen was tender and sensitive. They both lived in Paris in late 1996 after he was named creative director for the House of Givenchy. At only 27, he was in the incredible position of creating his first couture collection while also working on his own brand. Ray was tasked with photographing behind the scenes, and for the next 13 years, he gave her unprecedented access to his studio.
In Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous, showing at the Frist Art Museum’s Ingram Gallery through August, Ray shares the origin story of their love and all the creativity and connection she found in McQueen’s presence. When talking about their first meeting during a recent media preview at the Frist, Ray playfully describes them as two creatures circling at the edge of the woods. “We were sniffing each other,” she says. Ray has collaborated with Barrett Barrera Projects, the world’s largest private collection of McQueen, to organize this retrospective of not only McQueen’s work, but also, more emphatically, their friendship.
Ray documented 43 of McQueen’s collections, taking more than 32,000 photos — including exclusive portraits, candid behind-the-scenes shots and stills of the catwalk. Rendez-Vous includes 65 photographs selected by Ray, organized thematically alongside 60 garments by McQueen. Thirteen of these garments are exclusive to the Frist’s presentation of Rendez-Vous.
Famously, when the two first began working together, McQueen claimed he couldn’t pay Ray, so he gave her clothes in exchange for her photographs. The show opens with 10 of the outfits she was given, many of which have never been worn because his designs were completely at odds with Ray’s “quintessentially French personal style.” Throughout the rest of the show, McQueen’s work is organized chronologically, from the sharpness of his earliest shows — including his controversial 1995 collection, Highland Rape — to the breathtaking softness of his posthumous collection, Angels and Demons, which was completed by his assistant Sarah Burton.
McQueen was an immaculate tailor, and his garments are awesome in their construction. Of particular note is the one-of-a-kind dress from Highland Rape that looks like it’s made of peat moss and soil, but is actually a fragile construction of paint, plastic wrap and resin. We witness his shifts among the natural and artificial, structural and liquid, romantic and horrifying. Paradoxes abound, such as in his final complete collection, Plato’s Atlantis, which was intended as a commentary about our destruction of the earth. Still, making such a statement through the environmental disaster that is the fashion industry feels a bit toothless, despite the collection’s otherworldly beauty and revolutionary digital prints.
“Monsieur McQueen," Ann Ray
If McQueen’s work is loud, larger-than-life and sometimes violent in presentation, then Ray’s photographs are the opposite. When viewed alongside the armor of his art, the fragility of hers is heightened. Her photographs are cinematic, containing tremendous emotion — pride, elation, tenderness and power — while also finding deeply human liminal moments.
One of the best examples is her immortalization of McQueen’s spring/summer 1999 collection, No. 13, whose astounding finale had model Shalom Harlow sprayed with paint by two looming robots. It is harrowing, but Ray’s photograph of Harlow’s face midscene is rapturous. Ray describes it as “a moment of eternity. … In front of the unspeakable, [there was] so much beauty.”
For those most interested in gaining some kind of insight or potential truth about McQueen, several portraits serve this purpose best — in particular two images displayed midway through the exhibition, both taken in 1999. “No Compromise” shows a confrontational McQueen, chin jutting at the camera, a joint in his mouth. In opposition to this is “Innocence,” which finds the artist in a rare natural smile during a brief portrait session at Givenchy. There’s nothing innocent about this grown man, but Ray calls upon us to see differently.
In a similar spirit, the wall text throughout the exhibition emphasizes the artist’s relationship with women — not only Ray, but also his mother, his friends Isabella Blow and Annabelle Neilson and others — in a clear attempt to counter the critiques of misogyny that have been directed at him. By acknowledging the controversies of his life and the sorrow of his death, Rendez-Vous asks us to keep turning the story in our hands, to see another side.
It is impossible to say that Rendez-Vous provides a more truthful version of the story of McQueen. Still, through Ray’s lens, we can know how she knew him, what she perceived in him, and how much of their time together must have been such fun.
For McQueen, fashion was an instrument, a performance that happened just once. In Ray’s photographs, they have been engraved for all time.
