Savage Beauty

If you've always thought that clothing design is for sissies, empty-headed and giddy, this retrospective of the career of Alexander McQueen currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum will change your mind.

Up close his creations are magnificent-- boldly executed, finely detailed, and wonderfully, often shockingly, imaginative.

Step back and look again. These are not clothes many women would wear. Instead they are meant for the rapacious female creatures of nightmares-- powerful, preying, sinister and at the same time mesmerizingly beautiful and seductive.

Savage Beauty is a tour de force of McQueen's remarkable imagination and well worth seeing. But be forewarned, there is nothing happy here.