The job of a curator is to curate. To build a collection and nurture it, to assemble the story of an artform in pieces, sculpting a whole that is always both greater than and totally reliant on its parts.
This is the reason curators from the fashion department at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) were in London in the summer of 1996. The city was in the grips of a creativity boom; English designers such as John Galliano were the talk of the industry. The curatorial team purchased pieces directly from a brace of up-and-coming young talents to speak to this sartorial moment: Walter Van Beirendonck, Owen Gaster, Martin Margiela, Steven Jones, Patrick Cox and Christian Louboutin. (“We had a lot of money that meeting!” jokes Danielle Whitfield, curator of fashion and textiles.) The curators also paid a visit to the buzzing Hoxton Street studio of a rising star designer and purchased – “for a few hundred pounds”, shares NGV's senior curator of fashion and textiles, Katie Somerville – the very first items by Lee Alexander McQueen to be secured on behalf of NGV's fashion archive.
These items – a mercurial silver set comprising an exquisitely tailored pair of trousers and a matching blouse, runway samples worn during McQueen's autumn/winter '96/'97 ‘The Hunger’ collection – are an ode to the designer's staggering genius, co-curated with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and opening in Melbourne this month. Both institutions have the largest public holdings of McQueen in their respective countries; NGV's collection is the biggest in the entire southern hemisphere, and has recently been bolstered by the financial support and dogged pursuit of priceless pieces over the past four years of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM, NGV fashion champion and philanthropist
