Cocktail dress
1997 {Eclect Dissect collection, autumn-winter 1997–98}
- Medium
- leather, silk, metal and plastic fastenings
- Measurements
- 124.0 cm (centre back) 36.0 cm (waist, flat)
- Place/s of Execution
- Paris, France
- Inscription
- label, right side back, woven in white on black synthetic fabric: HAUTE COUTURE / GIVENCHY
- Accession Number
- 2015.2
- Department
- International Fashion and Textiles
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by the Bertocchi family, 2015
© Givenchy, Paris
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Professor AGL Shaw AO Bequest - Gallery location
- Special Exhibitions Gallery
Ground Level, NGV International - About this work
-
This work was shown in a Paris medical school in July 1997 as part of Alexander McQueen’s second couture collection for Givenchy. Conceived as a narrative, the runway show imagined a turn-of-the-century surgeon who travelled the world collecting objects, textiles and women, taking them apart and reassembling them in his lab. Ingenious and theatrical, the collection referenced late Victorian dress and seventeenth-century anatomical drawings, while the models represented the murdered women, returned to haunt the living. Mash-ups of exotic finery, the garments showed McQueen’s skilful material dissections of traditional dress codes from Spain, Scotland, Russia and, in the case of this cocktail dress, Japan.