“I wanted to learn everything, everything. Give me everything.” This quote appears on a large screen, playing footage of a young Lee McQueen at work, adjusting a model’s hair.
It is a sentiment that permeates the National Gallery of Victoria’s Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse, which opens on 11 December. As well as being a Savile Row-trained tailor and highly skilled maker, McQueen was a voracious consumer of film, photography, art, music, technology and philosophy, as well as natural and human history.