We met at nine outside the college, and were in London for one, only giving us five hours for exploring, which was unfortunate, especially as we spent four hours traveling there and four hours back!
After having lunch we ended up in the Natural History Museum - pretty, but not really needed for my project - I wanted to have a look in the V&A at the jewellery and clothing, and to see how expensive the 'Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty' exhibiton was, what with him being one of the first reasons I wanted to learn to sew.
He committed suicide on my birthday, and since then I have been fascinated with him. The dramatic clothing, the excessive detailing, how he sometimes models his clothes on mannequins instead of live bodies, and how this adds something to them that's more associated with art than with fashion.
Now my current art project is a wearable-structure-project, ie I'm making bits of clothing out of stuff that doesn't resemble fabric, and this time it's lingerie made out of stuff from hardware stores. Sounds weird, but it kinda works, there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between fashion and DIY, as so many things originally was hand sewn, then it experienced a resergence in the punk era.
Anyway, back to the post, we went to the dinosaur section of the NHM, and I thought that the natural armour plating and layers of bone would be in some way or another relatable to my art project, and so I took plenty of photos to relate to later, if needed.
When I eventually got to the V&A the tickets to 'Savage Beauty' were a tenner, as well as being all booked up for today. Sad times. I did end up in the shop and bought myself a brand new tape measure from the 'Savage Beauty' section, which doesn't sound so great but it's nice to have something from the exhibition and will be very useful as my old one has 1/2" cut off one end and is stuck together with masking tape halfway down!
I was very excited to find out there was an exhibition on the history of 'Shoes: Pleasure and Pain', which would have been very appropriate for my current work, but that wasn't opening until the 13th of June and the other exhibition, 'What is Luxury?' was also in development at the moment. I had a wander around the history of women's fashion and took some photos.
What was I meant to see next? The jewellery section was crowded by schoolchildren and I had already got photos of some of the metalwork for a past art project, so where could I go? Back to the dinosaurs?
Of course, to the café! For a fabulous hot chocolate before we spent four hours journeying home.
Toni
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