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In 50 years' time, fashion historians will look back at the turn of this century as a golden age - as important as when Christian Dior launched the New Look. A ground-breaking autumn exhibition at the V&A, sponsored by The Observer, celebrates the rise of the radical - from British showman Alexander McQueen to Belgian recluse Martin Margiela. Here, Tamsin Blanchard introduces our exclusive 30-page preview
As Bjork twisted her hips on stage, the bright red ostrich feathers of her crinoline skirt moved independently of her, making her movements look odd and dislocated. And as her body shook, the shiny glass beads suspended from her bodice rang like tiny bells. In the extraordinary dress, she became a human tambourine. The singer, who is no stranger to the more remote, outlandish regions of planet fashion, is the only woman in the world to own the Alexander McQueen dress. It's one of his favourites, partly because it was so difficult to create. The glass beads are actually 2,000 microscope slides, ordered from a surgical supplier, and each one is hand drilled. Then they are individually painted red. 'It took about a month-and-a-half to make that dress,' he says. 'The construction under the feather skirt is something else. It's like an 18th-century crinoline. It was the only thing that would stand the shape. Everything is sewn by hand.' The significance of the glass is that it is about putting the body under a microscope. They are red because 'there's blood beneath every layer of skin.'
The only other dress in existence is being installed in a glass tank at the V&A, to be displayed as part of the museum's new show, Radical Fashion. For Alexander McQueen, provocation and fashion go hand in hand. 'It has to be radical to make people sit up and to change the way things are,' he tells me, while preparing for his show this weekend. The self-proclaimed 'bad egg' of British fashion has moved his own collection to Paris for the first time. 'Radical is about challenging what's accepted and what's not. Sometimes it's vulgar, but beauty comes out of that. Sometimes it will hark back to history, because everything has to have a basis. Most of the time, I try to...