The secret about McQueen's mannequins

Any Alexander McQueen retrospective was always going to be characterised by thoughtfulness and exactitude. With the opening date for the Costume Institute’s Savage Beauty show looming, we’re getting tantalising insights into the work that went into creating the exhibition.

Those mannequins? They’re not mannequins—they’re models, manipulated to resemble life-like statues through ‘a combination of makeup, lighting and Photoshop,’ reported the New York Times.

Photographer Sølve Sundsbø and his team painted four models in a white acrylic paint from MAC that dried fast and didn’t rub off the garments. Next, they tied strings around the models’ wrists, necks, waists—anywhere a traditional mannequin would show assembly seams.

During the retouching process, editors emphasised the seams and replaced the models’ heads with featureless mannequin heads, or lopped them off altogether. Et voila—the frozen effect of the catalogue.

The image-creation process spanned two months. The catalogue includes Sundsbø’s shots of model Polina Kasina, a favourite of McQueen’s, in the same gold duck-feather coat and tulle skirt she wore in the designer’s posthumous A/W ’10 show. There are chillingly lifelike images from McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection, his black feather finale piece from A/W ’09, and other iconic designs from his career.

The inventive techniques only proved possible because the exhibition drew heavily from the McQueen archives, rather than the Met’s Costume Institute. (Garments may never be worn once accessioned into the museum’s fashion department.)

To Sundsbø, th