ALEXANDER McQUEEN
with Dr. Kate Bethune

Tuesday 14th July 2015
Doors open at 6:30 pm, Talk commences at 7:00 pm

The son of a London cab driver and a school teacher, Alexander "Lee" McQueen grew up in Stratford, East London. After dropping out of school with one O level at the age of 16, he perfected his tailoring skills on Savile Row, graduated with an MA in fashion design from Central Saint Martins and went on to embark on a career as one of the most innovative and talented designers of all time.

McQueen once said of London, "It's where my heart is, and where I get my inspiration." Join Kate Bethune, the senior researcher behind the hit show at the V&A Savage Beauty, for an insight into the "l'enfant terrible" and genius of British fashion.

Kate Bethune
Dr. Kate Bethune is an experienced researcher and curator with a developed expertise in fashion. Her projects include the major V&A exhibitions Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950 (2012), Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s (2013) and the blockbuster exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015).

Kate has experience in all aspects of the curatorial process, including contextual and object-based research, developing exhibitions from the curatorial brief to object installation, and writing, editing and proofing text for exhibition and publication outputs. She also has a developed knowledge of Collections Management best practice.

Tickets £20 including a glass of prosecco. Please click here to buy.

2015 DATES AT THE CAFE ROYAL

28th May 2015
Sue Tilley on Leigh Bowery

9th June 2015
Suits, Sex and Savile Row with Ian Kelly

14th July 2015
Kate Bethune on Alexander McQueen

In 1863, a French wine merchant called Daniel Nicholas Thévenon and his wife arrived in England in a bid to escape the clutches of creditors in Paris. So began a story that grew out of bankruptcy and culminated in the creation of Regent Street’s Café Royal: a truly remarkable and original establishment with what was considered at one point to have the greatest wine cellar in the world and was reputed for its excellent hospitality, dining and entertainment. 

Frequented by writers and artists such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, the conversations, inspirations and discussions at ‘The Café’ were profound. Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, W B Yeats, Walter Sickert and James McNeill Whistler were all patrons. Distinguished figures such as Winston Churchill, Augustus John, D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Noël Coward, Jacob Epstein and Graham Greene were also often seen.