Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s memorial tribute to the British fashion designer who died by his own hand in February 2010, is surely the most stupendous exhibition ever mounted by the Met’s Costume Institute. By rapid and random turns it is breathtaking, creepy, decadent, dreamlike, fetishistic, grandiose, grotesque, hilarious, infantile, majestic, meretricious, nightmarish, perverse, ponderous, ridiculous, sentimental, stately, tawdry, touching, and wondrous, often in contradictory combinations of those traits.

The show establishes beyond refutation that McQueen was some kind of genius, though precisely what sort is harder to say. Unquestionably he ranks as a consummate tailor, as seen in the stunning enfilades of flawlessly cut coats, jackets, trousers, and dresses, mainly in black, that occupy the first of the show’s seven operatically staged galleries.

Metropolitan Museum of Art/Solve Sundsbo / Art + Commerce

Chiffon dresses from McQueen’s 2010 autumn/winter collection

The severity of line and exactitude of construction that he learned as a teenaged apprentice on London’s Savile Row were later softened by the delicate craftsmanship he picked up from the petites mains of Paris haute-couture, after the luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH in 1996 chose this twenty-seven-year-old working-class Londoner to head the eponymous fashion house founded four decades earlier by the impossibly grand Hubert de Givenchy The dialectic between those two very different but equally demanding fabrication methods gave McQueen a technical ability unsurpassed by any of his present-day peers.

A view of the razor clam dress from Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

One can only gaze in open-mouthed awe at pieces in the Met show such as an ivory silk organza evening dress that is a veritable tornado of complex ruffles. You can’t help but think of the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus while regarding a frock encrusted from neck to toe with hundreds of phallic razor-clam shells, or marvel at the intricate workmanship of a diagonally-tiered mid-length cream silken lace skirt that hangs from a sutured brown-leather torso carapace, which in turn recalls a prosthetic on a George Grosz Kriegsinvalide.

The Met show has been an instantaneous sensation, breaking attendance records for the Costume Institute. Its popularity was boosted by the coincidence of its opening gala, three nights after the British royal nuptials, and Catherine Middleton’s choice of a wedding dress by Sarah Burton, who took over as creative director of McQueen’s London atelier soon after the founder’s death. Burton’s conservative though impeccably executed design looks dowdier each time one sees it, but if we could hardly have expected a flight of fevered fancy equal to her mentor’s twisted visions of Romantic rapture, the global chatter provoked by Middleton’s tidy little marital McQueen was enough to guarantee the Met show a succes fou.

The Armadillo boot from McQueen’s 2010 collection

The current exhibition displays nearly 100 outfits and fifty accessories, the cumulative effect of which is akin to a tasting menu of nothing but variations on foie gras. This almost nauseating surfeit of richness is nonetheless appropriate for McQueen, who disassociated the thoroughly impractical and largely unwearable fantasies of his couture runway shows from his ready-to-wear offerings, and made those twice-yearly high-end presentations into high-concept performance art. (This fact has not been lost on such followers as Lady Gaga, who has worn McQueen’s Jellyfish ensemble and Armadillo boots—both covered in iridescent enamel paillettes— in her stage act and Bad Romance music video.)

Permeating this go-for-broke extravaganza—intelligently curated by the Met’s Andrew Bolton and spectacularly installed by Sam Gainsbury and Joseph Bennett, the ingenious production designers who orchestrated McQueen’s runway shows — are twin hallmarks of the subject’s sensibility: excess (both wretched and glorious) and obsessiveness (which gives many of his creations the manic over-elaboration of art by the mentally ill). For sheer sumptuary extravagance nothing on view here tops an ensemble from the VOSS collection, with an overdress made of panels taken from a nineteenth-century Japanese silk screen and an underdress of oyster shells, topped off with the jeweler Shaun Leane’s devouring neckpiece of silver and Tahitian pearls. For mad micro-detailing that can make your eyes cross, the dense Egyptoid embroidery on a mini-dress from the Scanners collection puts King Tut’s haberdashers to shame.

Ensemble from McQueen’s 2001 VOSS collection made from a 19th-c. Japanese silk screen and oyster shells

There are also several frankly disgusting sub-themes that run through the exhibition like open sewage ditches among Le Notre’s part
erres at Versailles. If McQueen was the Mapplethorpe of fashion, it was not only for his similarly humble origins, homosexuality, taste for S&M, soaring ambition, ferocious opportunism, driven perfectionism, dogged work ethic, coke-fueled creative jags, and death at an early age , but also because of the rather puerile delight he took in seeking to shock the high bohemians who lionized him. Bad boys apparently never go out of fashion.

The front cover of the exhibition catalog takes a page straight out of the Mapplethorpe playbook: a plastic lenticular panel features a frontal headshot of the designer (by his nephew Gary James McQueen) that, when moved, morphs into a chrome-plated skull. McQueen’s sadomasochism is alluded to in several of his quotes in the exhibition’s wall texts and obvious in his appropriation of painful-looking torture paraphernalia—leather restraint masks, multi-buckled harnesses, and a metal crown-of-thorns— that might be found in a bondage-and-discipline boutique.

More profoundly disturbing is McQueen’s undeniable misogynistic streak, displayed in dresses and shoes that bind and hobble; repeated references to women being stabbed, sliced, and diced (and occasionally reassembled); women as impassive sex dolls; and videos showing models being burned at the stake, forcibly abducted, or in sundry states of extreme physical and psychic distress. Among the most unpleasant of these coups de theatre, his Fall 1998 couture collection, entitled Joan, climaxed with an all-too-lifelike re-enactment of The Maid of Orleans going up in flames. McQueen became defensive when accused of glamorizing anti-female violence, but no amount of rationalization can contradict what our eyes tell us.

To be sure, the deeply troubled McQueen—whose volatile mixture of anger, hurt, solipsism, and disinhibition is recognizable to anyone who has dealt with substance abuse at first or second hand— was inclusively misanthropic, and little of humanity was exempt from his free-floating rage. But when the primary consumers of your work are female, there is legitimate cause to question designs that seem hostile to women.

Alexander McQueen

The most damning evidence of McQueen’s ruthless careerism and monumental self-absorption concerns his appalling treatment of Isabella Blow, the fashion stylist and magazine editor who discovered him. Blow was so mesmerized by the collection McQueen created for his graduation from London’s Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in 1992—a Victorian-themed presentation he called Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims—that she bought all fourteen ensembles (two of which are included in the Met show.)

The pair became close friends, vacationed together, and Blow is said to have engineered the lucrative sale of his fledgling business to the Gucci Group in 2000, which made him rich. Yet the designer seems to have abandoned the emotionally vulnerable, always hard-up Blow when he was in a position to rescue her financially. As the socialite Daphne Guinness, another McQueen devotee, told The New York Times, “She was upset that Alexander McQueen didn’t take her along when he sold his brand to Gucci. Once the deals started happening, she fell by the wayside. Everybody else got contracts, and she got a free dress.”

Blow, a chronic depressive who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, committed suicide in 2007, three years before McQueen—who was distraught over the death of his adored mother and under treatment for depression—took an overdose of drugs and hanged himself in his Mayfair flat.

McQueen was in, on top of, and out of this world in only forty years, and moved at warp speed from enfant terrible to poete maudit to monstre sacre. His clamorously received Met retrospective now ratifies his final incarnation, that of tragic culture hero.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 31.

Replacing the off-white painted walls that had prevailed there since the Kennedy administration is wallpaper hand-painted in alternating vertical stripes of muted yellow and gold ochre. The colors come across as muddy in photographs, and the stripes are sure to vex art directors who will struggle to align out-of-parallax pictures of the President and his visitors. Such a troublesome backdrop would never have gotten past Michael Deaver, who skillfully stage-managed the visuals for Ronald Reagan’s role of a lifetime.

Most of the paintings have been in the Oval Office for some time. To the left of the desk is the American Impressionist Childe Hassam’s Avenue in the Rain (1917), a Kennedy acquisition that depicts New York’s Fifth Avenue aflutter with red-white-and-blue flags. (Another version from that series was surreptitiously sold by Brooke Astor’s felonious son, Anthony Marshall.) To the desk’s right is the equally patriotic if less artistically satisfying Statue of Liberty (1946)—a diagonal close-up of the monument’s torch-bearing arm, painted by Norman Rockwell for a Saturday Evening Post Fourth of July cover.

Over the fireplace still hangs an oval portrait of George Washington (c. 1825-1860) by Rembrandt Peale. On the mantel below it persists a dated fixture introduced by Betty Ford: a sprawling Swedish ivy plant (Plectranthus australis) that is kept perennially lush through frequent replacements of hothouse specimens cultivated by the National Park Service.

In front of the hearth is a furniture grouping that has brought gasps of horror from design aficionados. A facing pair of slope-armed sofas—covered in a velour-like cocoa-colored cotton-and-rayon blend interspersed with red, white, and blue threads—is reminiscent of the defunct downmarket furniture chain Levitz. Between them stands a rectangular slab-ended coffee table surfaced in thin layers of mica and surmounted by a faux-rustic bowl of apples.

Gone are the traditional urn-shaped gilded china lamps that stood on Federal drop-leaf tables next to the sofas. Replacing that lighting are lamps with deep-blue cylindrical ceramic bases of the sort one might encounter in a Park Avenue dermatologist’s waiting room.

However, it’s not as though Obama is blind to his surroundings. During his predecessor’s tenure, the Oval Office bookshelves displayed decorative dishes propped up on stands, accessories more appropriate for a dining room than an office, but perhaps not out of keeping with the least well-read President in modern memory. Obama eyed those porcelain pieces with suspicion during his first week on job, when he told one nonplussed military officer, “I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m really not a plates kind of guy.” The dishes duly disappeared with the recent changes.

Banished almost immediately upon Obama’s arrival was a bronze bust of Winston Churchill by Jacob Epstein, lent by the British government in solidarity after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Analysts noted that during the Mau Mau rebellion of the early 1950s the President’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was jailed and allegedly tortured by British colonial authorities under Churchill’s last government. To supplant the offending sculpture, the President chose a similarly scaled portrait head of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Strangest of the new Oval Office furnishings is the custom-made carpet donated by its Michigan manufacturer. Starting with Harry Truman, the room has sported a series of elliptical rugs centered with a large Presidential seal. The two abstainers from that trend were Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, whose patterned floor covering omitted the star-encircled eagle motif, which returned under Reagan.

Now the eagle has landed once again. It spreads its wings on Obama’s predominantly beige carpet, between the desk and the sitting area. The off-white black-banded border of the rug is woven in brown with hortatory quotations from Lincoln (“of the people, by the people, for the people”), Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”), as well as Kennedy and King. Exponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement were wont to inscribe uplifting mottoes on friezes that ran around a room. But the floor is an odd place to honor such revered words, a placement that appears to challenge the Revolutionary War slogan lately co-opted by Obama’s nemesis, the Tea Party: “Don’t Tread on Me.”