Now available at the Metropolitan gift shop, the Prada “Flame” shoes ornament.  So lovely!

Cassie was one of the guests in attendance at the McQueen “Savage Beauty” opening, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, last week. We thought you might enjoy these images of her being readied for the red carpet in a crew assembled by Rag & Bone designers, David Neville and Marcus Wainright, whose dress she wore and with whom she attended the event. Here’s what they had to say about her dress:

“Cassie donned a custom rag & bone dress made of cobalt blue washed calf skin, stingray and quilted waxed leather. The hard, angular silhouette and high back neckline was inspired by some of the Elizabethan themes so often referenced by McQueen.”

On the next page, see the dress, plus her spiked-out Louboutins and more.

We already covered the red carpet for the Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but here’s an additional shot of Rihanna and Kanye sitting at their table during the event. Vogue has a gallery of more off-red-carpet shots, which, if you get off on people watching like myself, are always so much more compelling than the entry images.

Alexander McQueen image from book that accompanies exhibit

A NY Times articles covering the Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought up some interesting points. First, the show is mostly paid for by the Alexander McQueen fashion house, which suprised me. I didn’t realize you could essentially pay your way into a museum as prestigious as the Met. And apparently this is even “the norm,” according to the article:

“Two years later the Guggenheim — though it denies this — effectively rented its Manhattan premises to Giorgio Armani for his retrospective. (Such deals are now the norm, and the Met is forthright about stating that most of the money for the McQueen retrospective comes from the fashion house called Alexander McQueen.)”

The other thought-provoking point was author Holland Cotter’s observation that while fashion designers often want their work to be viewed as art, they’re very rarely critiqued as such with the end result exhibits that are big on fluff and lacking substance. In speaking about the McQueen exhibit, he says,

“The Met exhibition passes all this off as manifestations of a Romantic temperament, but you have to ask critical questions. The chief problem with the fashion-as-art fad of the 1990s was precisely that it didn’t ask them.” And then later adds, “My point is: If you’re going to deal with fashion as art, treat it as art, bring to it the distanced evaluative thinking, including social and political thinking, that scholars routinely apply to art. Such an approach is standard in exhibition catalogs that accompany most Met shows, but not in the McQueen catalog, which, beautiful though it is, is heavy on pictures, skimpy on text.”

Holland also challenges some of McQueen’s assertions about his design intent, as well instances in which he feels the designer was hypocritical. A fascinating read, which challenges how we view fashion. Plus, there are lots of pretty pictures from the show.

We’ve showed the red carpet for the party that opened Alexander McQueen’s ”Savage Beauty” retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and in this post we give a look at the exhibit itself. In general images from museum shows don’t do them justice. My experience is you have to be immersed in the environment to catch the artist’s greatness. Still, this is a nice taste for those whom a trip to New York is out of the question.