Kate Bethune
Senior Exhibition Research Assistant, V&A:
McQueen was one of the most influential fashion designers of his generation. He really changed the way people look at fashion with his radical and fearless visions. McQueen himself was inspired by the V&A and that’s why it’s so important to get people out of the classroom and here, to be inspired.

Bianca Davis
Head of Art, Claremont High School Academy:
I think it’s hugely beneficial for our students to come out of the classroom, it makes such a difference seeing design objects first hand. You can’t ever understand form and shape, from a photograph, the way you can understand it when you are in front of it and all of our students were blown away by the McQueen exhibition, absolutely loved it.

Student 1, Claremont High School Academy:
I thought the exhibition was really inspiring, I liked, seeing the clothes that he made because it was so different from what you usually see.

Student 2, Claremont High School Academy:
The whole thing has made me see the world of fashion as a lot more free than before and gave me a lot more capability to make mistakes.

Student 3, Claremont High School Academy:
Alexander McQueen, I mean he is amazing! His work is just so different and out there, so it makes you think wow.

Bianca Davis
Head of Art, Claremont High School Academy:
So we wanted to take part in the project as we had worked with the V&A before and they have the most fantastic Schools team and we love working with them and we’ve always got so much out of them. We love McQueen, were trying to build a Textiles reputation in our school at the moment so this was an incredible opportunity to get all of that combined.

The project has been all about responding to the work of Alexander McQueen using the V&A’s exhibition but also using their standing collection to respond to the shapes, the forms, the patterns but also looking at the Natural History Museum’s collection and understanding how natural forms can influence an artist both in textiles and fashion design. There’s no question we have seen that in the work they have produced and how they are exploring new silhouettes and new forms.

Student 1, Claremont High School Academy:
It’s nice to work on a project in the Museum instead of school because you’ve got a lot more around you that inspires you, so in the Museum you’ve got the exhibitions and all the different things you can see and it’s very easy to pull inspirations.

Bianca Davis
Head of Art, Claremont High School Academy:
Working with artists and designers, you can’t replicate it in any way! It’s so lovely to work with people who are used to working at university level and bring those skills down to GCSE, rather than them having to wait until their foundation and beyond it really gives them a taster of what possible progression routes are available to them.

Juliana Sissons
Fashion & Knitwear designer:
They start off by learning the print methods in a very quick way, so they are drawing, they are taking it straight through to digital print. They can see immediately how they are going to work on a garment. So they have already worked flat, now they are working three dimensionally so they can see the whole construction of a dress and then at the end of it all they’re going to see a brilliant collection of clothing that they probably couldn’t do elsewhere to be honest. In these surroundings, with this inspiration and the resources we have here, they are going to get some unique training and some unique outcomes from this collection, so I think they will really love it.