Alexander McQueen/Savage Beauty: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Catalog

Momentarily (for a morning) between projects, I steal an hour with one of the gifts I gave my husband this past Father's Day.  Assembled by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, Savage Beauty, the retrospective look at Alexander McQueen's unmatched fashion career, bears down on you with its monstrous, lovely glory.  Nothing impresses me more than a form-breaking designer; McQueen was that and he was also more—an impeccable tailor, a performance artist, a poet, a political observer, an historian, a very public man with very personal ideas.  His early death was tragic.

I think McQueen would have appreciated this little girl's fabulous sense of style, and so I place her here, beside one of the many quotes that floats throughout this magnificent, cloth-bound catalog.

Birds in flight fascinate me.  I admire eagles and falcons.  I'm inspired by a feather but also its color, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering.  It's so elaborate.  In fact I try and transpose the beauty of a bird to women.
— Alexander McQueen