Alexander McQueen: Relationality between human and non-human
From Runways to the Museums: New Material Feminism
The subversive use of semiotic in McQueen's fashion engages with Foucault idea that sex is an origin rather than a cause. Therefore, Savage Beauty exhibition held in Metropolitan Museum of Art in New-York City, in 2011, comprises the overlap of the power-relationship between genders. McQueen exemplifies the relationship of hybridity between non-human and human sexual behaviour into an affective set ((1)Seely 2012, 253). In comparison to Mugler, Mcqueen exhibition is not based on displaying absent bodies through simple mannequins. I would argue that the unexpected use of alien figure like contributes to a new sensorial subjectivity. The mannequins do not attempt to mimic the human behaviours or any universal features. Savage Beauty recreates liveliness. Even though the audience could not interact directly with the pieces of garment, I would deem that the audience is involved in a more self-styling setting. The fascinating features of the non-human like figures are their non-idealized feminine features. A kind of non-gender dialogue is advocated by the interconnectedness with the invisible others.
Equally, I would say that McQueen Exhibition challenges the traditional aesthetic of museum qualities by playing semi-autonomous being into a transitory space. In comparison with Mugler, McQueen integrate shells, feathers, antlers, animal skins, and even entire taxidermed animals to create a “molecular proximity” with the animal that transforms the body in a nonhuman fashion ((2)p.253).
The role of agency of nonhuman factors is instrumental within a new-materialist approach. A new-materialist approach is based on rethinking the dualism and the material agency . Deconstruction as mentioned previously is a way to question new materialist concerns and to move toward a non-anthropocentric view.
McQueen transgresses normative model of fashion by questioning genderless questions. The assemblage of women is not meant to be sexualized as Mugler constructed idea of women, the assemblage consists in giving a new agency of self-styling.
Karen Barad’s terms (3, p.178)
All bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity
– its performativity. This is true not only of the surface or contours of the body but
also of the body in the fullness of its physicality, including the very ‘atoms’ of its being.
Bodies are not objects with inherent boundaries and properties; they are material-discursive
phenomena.
