Alexander McQueen (Q22)
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British luxury fashion house
- Alexander Mcqueen
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Alexander McQueen |
British luxury fashion house |
|
Statements
intern
print designer
intern
creative director
2023
menswear team
head assistant
print designer
1995
designer
unknown
designer
job offer
design assistant
Seán McGirr’s second runway outing for McQueen began with a tailored suit, the lapels rolled together at the chest as if to ward off a sudden London rainstorm—or perhaps the buffeting of his critics. The Irishman’s debut was met with intense skepticism last season. He was an untested frontman replacing the beloved Sarah Burton, who had been Lee Alexander McQueen’s right hand and led the house on her own for over a decade. It was never going to be an easy launch, but it was made more difficult by the inhospitable warehouse space he chose on the outskirts of Paris for his show and the cold, rainy drive required to get there.Putting all that behind him tonight, he staged his sophomore outing at the École des Beaux-Arts, right off the Seine on the Left Bank, a venue that’s hosted scores of shows over the years, though never a McQueen collection if memory serves. And, as McGirr pointed out, he had the benefit of a longer lead-up than he did for his first go-round. It showed in the collection, which was more cohesive and more commercially viable.He said that he started by looking at Lee McQueen’s sketches, which are collected in the label’s archives. “You know, his signature was really the S-bend, so I was thinking of a way to interpret it,” he said. That’s how the rolled lapel silhouette came about. He also played with McQueen’s iconic bumster, cutting mid-rise trousers with a horizontal mesh panel an inch or so below the waistband that provided a peekaboo glimpse of skin whose effect was sweeter and less daring than the scandalizing originals. On the more informal side, he used military surplus for a cropped jacket, worn with a bustle-backed mini kilt, as well as a washed cotton mac with a contrast-colored velvet collar.McGirr had also been inspired by McQueen’s second runway show, Banshee, citing commonalities in their Celtic heritage and the stories his mother told him about the banshees’ strong spirit. The sophomore season parallel is handy too. Where his first reference, The Birds, is remembered as a fairly aggressive McQueen show, Banshee had dark romantic undertones. They manifested most clearly in a long black dress embroidered with thorns, a reference recognizable from the Met Gala dress he designed for Lana Del Rey.Comparatively, there was a bigger emphasis on red-carpet fare this season. McGirr’s got a surer hand with eveningwear than with tailoring, which will prove useful, given the valuable role celebrities can often play in rebrands these days.
Daphne Guinness, who bought Isabella Blow’s extensive collection of McQueen’s work after her passing, was in the crowd tonight, giving McGirr her blessing. A frayed lilac georgette party dress inset with embroideries of silver bullion was striking, and a minidress in brushed white chiffon worn with a gold beaded and sequined jacket made for a strong look. But the one that really got the blood pumping—the one you could picture Guinness in—was the most extreme, with its shining embroideries of silver chains that followed the lines of the body. McGirr made some important advances here.
28 September 2024
The new McQueen lookbook was photographed at Hatfield, a grand country house outside of London. There’s an oak tree on the property that is said to be the site where Elizabeth I learned she would become queen. “It’s quite mega,” said creative director Sean McGirr of the old manse, one of whose astounding wood mantelpieces features in these pictures. “I thought about this aristocratic punk—that’s just very McQueen, that's who he was surrounded by, think of Isabella Blow.”The late magazine editor Isabella Blow, who famously bought the entirety of Lee McQueen’s graduate collection, is the subject of a biopic in pre-production. In it, Andrea Riseborough stars as Blow, Emilia Clarke plays her pal Daphne Guinness, and Hayley Atwell takes on the role of Alexandra Schulman, the Vogue editor who employed her. IMDb doesn’t list an actor for McQueen, but surely he’ll have a part in the story.McQueen’s personal biography is equally as riveting as the clothes he made, and the Saltburn-y location of this shoot suggests the newcomer McGirr has cottoned to that fact. The upcoming movie could be a boon for him, with its potential to awaken a younger generation to the house founder’s extraordinary talent and mystique.Being an off-season without the high stakes of a runway show, this collection registers as more street-ready, or maybe house party-ready, than his fall debut. He said the concept for the shoot was “girls and boys hanging out, wearing each other’s clothes.” The focus is on tailoring and everyday statement pieces like sweaters whose popped collars reach past the ears, and leather jackets with eensy proportions above exaggerated peplums, and jeans with nail fringe embroidery decorating the front pockets. T-bar hardware extends the punkish feeling to bags and shoes.English school uniforms were a starting point, their aristocratic connotations tweaked by the irreverence of double-breasted jackets nipped tight, cargos cut with extra slouch, and shirt collars that extend almost to the shoulders. McGirr said the clothes were designed to be unisex, including the paperbag-waist trousers, soft blouses with boho ruffles, and cropped cardigans shrunken enough to leave gaps between their buttons. “I like the idea that you don’t change it,” he explained. “If you do change it [across genders] it loses its panache.
”The collection’s print is a rendering of Velazquez’s portrait of the Pope Innocent X, chopped up and reassembled on pajama separates and an asymmetrically draped dress, and embellished with crystals on a turtleneck bodysuit. McGirr is an art lover who likes to spend his trips to New York in its galleries, so it’s tempting to look for easter eggs in the 17th century masterpiece. Centuries later the portrait inspired Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Pope” series, and Google reveals that a study for the famous painting now lives at another historic English house, Apsley House, in London. The draped dress makes a centerpiece of the letter in Pope Innocent’s hand. What message is McGirr trying to send? He said he simply liked the idea that the girls and boys at the party were “wearing the art from the walls.”
29 July 2024
The changing of the guard at McQueen began with a woman wrapped in shiny black laminated jersey, with one arm pinioned across her breast, the other tucked inside the skirt. Seán McGirr said he’d been inspired by looking at The Birds, Lee McQueen’s spring ’95 collection, in which he’d encased a model in transparent pallet tape. “This sort of idea of a compressed silhouette actually anchors the whole collection,” the 35-year-old newbie in the hot seat was saying before the show. “So I was trying to kind of bring that forward, bring that message forward, bring those silhouettes and see what I could do with real clothes.”The venue—a disused railway shed on the outskirts of Paris—echoed the rawness of the original venue, a derelict rave warehouse in London’s Kings Cross where McQueen had shown The Birds. McGirr has big shoes to fill, though he wasn’t showing any signs of nerves. His instinct for interpreting the brand, he said, is that “it should have sort of playful aggression to it, and should be kind of uplifting, because I want to bring a kind of lightness to McQueen.”McGirr said he’s not had a chance to delve into the archives yet (he only started on Dec 1st last year), but had taken his initial cues from looking at runway photos, mixed with paparazzi pictures of Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse. What he took from them, to set his tone, was more the vibe than literal references. “It’s a man or woman who are hedonistic characters,” he said. “In a way it was like, these sort of people who modeled for McQueen in the ’90s, they kind of looked like people on the fringes. Outsiders. I’m really interested in that. So I guess it’s about singular characters with really strong personalities that I'd be very curious to meet on the street in London; this sort of rough glamour of the East End. This idea of sort of damaged opulence. And I also like this kind of bitchy intelligence that kind of comes through a little bit in the attitude of the boys and girls.”As well as the idea of constriction—the binding McGirr lashed around skinny-legged jeans and as belts on sinister broad-shouldered men’s leather coats—there was what was about to break loose from it. “This animal within; some of it feels quite visceral,” he said. There were explosions of fur-like knitwear bursting from under tailoring and from the seams of jeans.
Later there were animal prints, one in the form of what looked like several cut-up animal-spot sweaters, as if the model had draped himself in a DIY punk version of animal skins.
3 March 2024
Sarah Burton made her finale at Alexander McQueen a visceral act of female symbolism—a collection fiercely true to herself and to all the values, skills, and beauty she’s upheld for 26 years. “This collection is inspired by female anatomy, Queen Elizabeth I, the blood red rose, and Magdalena Abakanowicz, a transgressive and powerful artist who refused ever to compromise her vision,” she wrote in the press statement. “The show is dedicated to Lee Alexander McQueen, whose wish was always to empower women, and to the passion, talent, and loyalty of my team.”A short black tailored dress, slashed at the bodice, corseted and cross-laced in the back, carried a host of meanings. The surgical cut—a direct reference to Alexander McQueen’s spring 1996 collection The Hunger—was a salute to the very beginning of the house McQueen founded. In the original, the slash was surrounded by a sooty print. In Burton’s version, repeated later surrounded with gold embroidery almost like a religious artifact, it suggested something else: not so much about violence, horror, and hurt, but almost a holy celebration of the ultimate creative power of the female body.There was no mistaking that reference later. Burton’s tribute to Britishness—the red rose of England—culminated in a pair of dresses at the heart of the collection that were petaled like flowers or vulval folds. She surrounded her ceremonial with the monumental, enveloping power of the textile sculptures of Abakanowicz, a Polish feminist artist: Her forms suggest the embrace of motherhood, vaginas, comfort, and protection.Armored in leather corsetry, exposed yet supported: Here was Burton’s vision of womanhood, her imprint on the house. It was an emotionally honest farewell that had the audience standing and applauding, while Sarah Burton, for once in her life, made a full circuit of the runway, receiving the accolades and love she so richly deserves.
30 September 2023
Only rarely do you encounter issues in life that are more pressing than fashion, but sometimes, nonetheless, you do. One of those affecting a member of the Alexander McQueen team—since 100% happily resolved—meant that this presentation took place later than usual, and in Milan for the first time in three years.Interestingly, this collection hit different in a city where, unlike London, tailoring remains a very well and widely worn pillar of menswear. The founder’s formative experience on Savile Row continues to influence this house deeply, and of the 31 looks here 18 of them featured a tailored double-breasted jacket or coat. Look 24 even contained both. Unlike Milan’s soft, single-breasted, and overwhelmingly navy sartorial dialect, this collection was predominantly black or charcoal and defined by unusual flourishes in silhouette. These, you’d wager, will likely spill over into the next womenswear collection we’ll see in Paris. Almost ubiquitous was a narrow black leather tie: James Bondage.Some of those shapely flourishes included the rounded shoulders in the opening black coat, look 4’s suit, and look 28’s deconstructed ceremonial regalia jacket. There were collar-details and highly unreachable pockets in the extended skirts on two rethought frock coats in black pinstripe and gray sharkskin. More conventionally cut double-breasteds, fitted with close precision, were shown above Sarah Burton’s very proper variations of the short shorts that we saw across the collections this menswear season. Elsewhere Burton strained against the conventional boundaries of tailoring by countering its defined silhouette with defiantly abstract fold prints in jacquard and embroidery realized in partnership with old school McQueen collaborator Simon Ungless.These entirely non-figurative patterns placed on Burton’s masculine figures were countered by a sally into chiaroscuro inspired flower embroideries—which could have been roses or Rorschash—on a gorgeous white cotton suit. These in turn led to the crochet knit flower vests that, thanks to some liver colored fronts, vaguely resembled the anatomically revealing dolls once supersized by Damian Hirst. Then, in a regal printed cape and flap-fronted bow-tied parka, the wearer was empowered entirely to blossom beyond tailoring’s tightly defined bouquet. This Milan expat and suiting skeptic swooned hardest at the zip-up biker trench hybrid in look 24 that would, with wear, tell its own story about the wearer.
Although it happened by chance, this return of Burton’s design to the country where most of this collection is made proved a happy cameo.
17 July 2023
This year has showcased the best of Sarah Burton’s talents. With two triumphs in hand—the superlative dark tailoring she showed in March in Paris, and her impeccable Coronation outfits for the Princess of Wales and Princess Charlotte—now comes the Alexander McQueen pre-fall collection that is unveiled in stores today. This one represents the continuous creative thought-process she and her teams work on, looping back to connect with the touchstones in the McQueen archive, and taking them forward.This season, she’d pulled out McQueen’s La Poupee spring 1997 collection—a reminder of the ingenious slash-and-reveal tailoring and dressmaking he was hand-making at the time. It’s a study that took her further into an anatomically-focused “peeling back” of cloth and leather, strategically spliced with zippers to open or close across the breasts, embedded in vertical inserts on trouser-legs, or used as devices to unfurl skirts.In person—these pieces were on view in the McQueen London flagship—the technical wizardry involved in carving out a fluid diagonal into the front of a black tuxedo jacket, or outlining a deep swooping S-shaped back in a heavily beaded dress was quite staggering. Ditto the way the McQueen teams will go to the extremes of embroidery—here, in the bejeweling and festooning of antique-looking crystals on an evening dress, tailored dresses, cutaway jackets, black tulle stiletto ankle boots, and bags.Still, this is a needs-must shoppable range that also folds in softer and more pragmatic pieces. There’s color in the orchid motifs (derived from Burton’s research on Victorian botanical studies) that were blown up on a giant gray sweater and played over the rippling tiers of silk dresses. And then, somehow you can’t help looking at the three simplest things in the shop: a trio of McQueen daywear trouser suits, sans slashing or embellishment. You know exactly the kind of customer they’re for—royalty included.
18 May 2023
In a season where the return to valuing designers who can genuinely cut it has risen high on the fashion agenda, Sarah Burton proved again that the house of Alexander McQueen is up there with the very best. Back in Paris, she chose the apposite moment to remind people of the sharpness and excellence of the tailoring—for women and for men—and the expression of a darkly explosive imagination that is alive in the McQueen ateliers in London.“It was looking at anatomy, the anatomy of tailoring,” she said backstage. “Almost back to the beginnings of McQueen on Savile Row. It was a progression, which starts very kind of straight and structured. And then it begins to flash and twist and turn upside down. It’s like how you begin with a garment—you have to know that there’s a way to construct it, the bones of it, before you can dissect it and subvert it.”Naomi Campbell, in a black jumpsuit with a swooping corseted bustier, led out a march of impeccable black suits, white shirts and black ties, and pinstripes cut into jackets and morphing into tailored strapless dresses. Strictness and pulled-together uniform have been surfacing as a theme this season; here, there was a precision and controlled tension of kinkiness where nothing was quite what it seemed.Burton partly put that down to having watched Cate Blanchett in Tar: “That part where you see the tailors making their chalk-marks on the cloth.” The broken lines she had woven into the pinstripes vibed on that process. Echoes of McQueen culture reverberated, literally in the circular space—the musical box sound of his ‘Joan of Arc’ collection of fall 1998, played backwards; a video take on the stop-motion Victorian photography of Eadweard Muybridge ran upside down on the encircling walls. “Because it feels like everything’s upside down in the world, I suppose,” Burton said with a shrug.Her idea about dressing and studying the body led her to the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Once you knew that, the peeled-back sections of knitwear dresses, incised on the hips, took on a new, sinister context. Surreptitious references to blood and guts were transformed and sublimated into asymmetric frills and prints which looked like giant orchids at some points, and drawings of dissected cadavers at others.Glints of fiery red and otherworldly silver lit up the eveningwear.
At one moment, a shredded-hem black bugle-beaded dress looked almost like a reincarnation of Alexander McQueen’s ruby red Joan of Arc dress, in which his model had met her finale in a ring of fire on the London runway.In calling up the past and reconnecting with the earliest days she’d worked with McQueen, Sarah Burton projected this collection right into the here and now. It had drama and strength, and many options for all genders to dress very differently than the over-blown theatrical costume that has passed for event-wear these past few years. It wouldn’t at all surprising if Cate Blanchett’s stylist is on the phone to McQueen’s headquarters tomorrow.
4 March 2023
Sarah Burton is a surgeon who this season applied her scalpel-sharp sensibility—and sensitivity to the McQueen codes—to slice and splice menswear’s tailoring template into an excitingly upgraded form.Deconstructing tailoring’s facade chunk by chunk, she amputated sleeves and shoulders to create tailored three buttoned bustiers, which when combined with high-rise matching charcoal pants—slightly kicky—resembled a single-garment counterpoint to the bumster (the nipster?). A gray wool peak collar double breasted jumpsuit in sharkskin gray, built to reflect a more conventional suit that came before it, featured a cutout panel on the lower back. There was a gorgeous evening jacket in black that came delicately dismembered between skirt and lapel in order to allow for navel gazing. Sometimes, as well as cutting out, Burton layered-over. A drop-shouldered white shirt with diagonal pleats radiating from the clavicle that was worn with a leg-length pleated pant and an ‘AM’ seal buckled belt had a progressive priestly minimalism to it.These exercises in cutting or pasting framed a collection that used the orchid as its chief emblem and which worked to rearrange the wearer as a cultivated object of beauty. The intricate black beaded orchid harness and the jacket whose cutout back was held together by the fleshy bead-realized petals of another scarlet bloom were the most direct adjacencies of these two themes. Long kilts, a fantastic scarlet cocoon coat, and an olive liner parka overprinted with black orchid silhouettes gave further nuance to Burton’s dialogue between flower and power.Another interesting experiment mixed indigo and black denim in patched jackets and pants to create an unorthodox oversized check that subtly stretched the norms of denim’s conventional wearing. This was a hothouse menswear collection from this perennially hot house; its return to Paris in a few weeks time for womenswear will be exciting.
31 January 2023
If there’s one thing Sarah Burton has mastered, it’s how to take a very English sense of romance—a full-skirted gown, a floral motif, lavish embroidery—and lend it a perfectly judged (and, come to think of it, equally English) dose of edge. It was a pleasure, then, to see her lean further into the darker and more dangerous territory she’s been exploring over the past few seasons, from sleek, sculptural leather jackets and skirts, to the deliciously kinky studded eyelets and harnesses that decorated shirting, accessories, and a handful of sleeveless blazer dresses.So too, were there plenty of satisfying parallels with Burton’s spring 2023 collection, which premiered last month under a bubble-like dome placed in the central expanse of Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College, and saw her lean into some of her predecessor’s racier instincts. Notably via slashed, tummy-baring blazers, and—perhaps most notably of all—the return of Lee McQueen’s infamous bumster pants, folding their eye-popping flash of buttock into razor-sharp tailoring to offer a surprisingly refined new spin on this most divisive of ’90s trends.For resort, Burton also experimented with deconstructed, skin-baring tailoring, whether a calf-length, caped blazer-dress hybrid with cutaway sleeves in a sumptuously thick black wool, or a particularly desirable jacket nipped and slashed at the waist to create a cocoon-like, sculptural seat, with crystals embroidered across the shoulders to create a kind of harness. For all their opulence, the clothes are grounded in a genuine spirit of practicality too; a green cotton jacket with bouffant sleeves that could easily be worn with a pair of jeans, or a calico trench coat with panel details and parka-like laces to cinch the waist on the fly.As a pre-collection, it’s only natural that it should have a more wearable bent. But a series of statement eveningwear pieces taking their cues from Burton’s ongoing fascination with astronomy—a one-shouldered gown lavished with crystals and sequins inspired by the milky glow of star constellations, or jackets with astral embroidery across the lapels—served as the most compelling reminder of Burton’s extraordinary ability to blend romance with reality.
As always, it’s when Burton lets herself get swept away into her more whimsical flights of fancy (and, by extension, sweeps you away along with her) that her distinctive vision of hard-edged glamour dazzles most—and her star-studded, night sky-inspired confections achieved a thrilling sense of lift-off.
17 November 2022
On a sparkling October day in London, a drone was hovering over the splendid Greenwich Naval College, recording the goings-on in a transparent bubble that had landed in the middle of Sir Christopher Wren’s 17th century landmark. It seemed a symbolic irony that the mechanical eye-in-the-sky—a standard device these days for recording fashion spectacles—must have been surveilling the focus of Sarah Burton’s collection hundreds of feet below. The human eye.“The eye is the most unique symbol of humanity—each one is like a fingerprint; each one is completely individual,” she said, explaining the enlarged prints and raffia-fringed images of irises, pupils, and eyelashes embedded in dresses and spilling over a trouser suit. That thought gave her the impetus to begin to grapple with layers of themes that the house of McQueen has always been concerned with: nature and technology, deep history and present fears.“It’s sort of about seeing things again,” she said. “Not walking around with your eyes shut, your eyes down. Just seeing each other, recognizing each others’ humanity. Caring about each other.” But against that, she also meant that having open eyes on the world means taking on terrors. Burton recently re-read Orwell’s1984. “That played into it as well: how do you find human contact in the world we live in, in the world of technology?”And then, she’d taken a good look at Hieronymus Bosch’sGarden of Earthly Delights, in a book with zoomed-in detail of the artist’s ghastly imaginings in a setting surrounded by flowers and fountains. There were Bosch demons battling with angels in Alexander McQueen’s posthumous collection. Burton was asked why she returned to the reference, to adorn some sections of the collection in patterns and embroideries after Bosch. “It’s the times we’re living in now, she said. “It feels like almost like we’re in another Dark Ages in many ways. It’s something we’ve always looked at, at McQueen. Life, death, destruction, beauty. It’s all there. Maybe,” she reflected, “it’s what people do to each other actually. And then, the beauty right next to it. So there’s this strange juxtaposition of humanity behaving in one way, and nature in another.”But we’re getting away from how her collection looked. Besides the decorative narratives, out came clean, sharp tailoring. Look two: a revival of McQueen’s bumsters, with a cropped tuxedo jacket cut into sharp points at the front and the rest of it balanced to swing at the back.
There are generations that have never heard of bumsters—Alexander McQueen invented that explosive downward shift of pant design in the 1990s. But the red-hot relevance of torso-exposure, and clothes designed to expose slices of naked flesh needs no explanation to new eyes.“It’s how would you adjust the proportion of a woman's body? I feel like it’s always about a woman dressing for a woman,” she added. “ So it’s not a male gaze. I wanted to sort of embrace the female form; to sort of slice away in a very kind of dissected way.”She pursued that idea through different tactics, in swooped-fronted tailored jumpsuits, knitted dresses fashioned in tiered strips leaving open slices of negative space, and in half-open panels aerating romantic full-skirted evening dresses at the finale.The references to the touchstones of the work of her late boss felt timely in this collection. Sarah Burton is designing in a different world, but the themes she brought to bear, and the skills inherent in the house resonate more than ever today.
11 October 2022
If you’re feeling a slight sense of deja vu, that’s understandable. Yes, the Alexander McQueen fall 2022 menswear lookbook did drop just five days ago, and yes, the spring 2023 lookbook is out today. Over the past few pandemic years, even the best of us have felt like time has collapsed in on itself, but it’s still a remarkably quick back-to-back. (The rationale, it’s worth noting, is to realign the house’s menswear offering with the broader schedule following previous, pandemic-related disruptions.)Despite the slightly disorientating timing, Sarah Burton’s vision for the McQueen man this season was as richly realized as ever, with the designer noting that after the thrill of her New York show in March, she felt inclined to dial things back a little. And if that collection was planted solidly in the earth—packed as it was with mushroom motifs, hempy frayed knits, and a palette of burnt oranges and molten reds—here, Burton looked to the skies. The collection’s muted palette featured twilight shades of dusty pinks and blues, while references to the cosmos and the night sky abounded; the most arresting details being sequins and crystals embroidered to form comets and astral patterns across the lapels of jackets, and in a particularly ravishing final look, covering the entire back of a coat.It wouldn’t be a McQueen collection, however, without a subversive edge. Accessories came punctured with metal eyelets, while cable knits and cardigans were artfully slashed down the sides, the former seamed back together with silver rings. A series of blazers with cut-out details and harnesses—some in leather, others decorated with crystals—added a quietly playful touch of kink. (That all of those harnesses were detachable felt like a particularly fun detail: you could wear it for a night at the opera, before cinching yourself into the leather straps to hit up a less salubrious destination afterwards.)Still, as always with Burton’s work, it’s the sheer technical mastery of it that felt most intoxicating. Tuxedo jackets cut from black grain de poudre and asymmetric waistcoats in wool gabardine fit so impeccably you can’t help but reach out and touch them. Even when in more quotidian fabrics, like a denim pullover shirt or a patched bomber jacket in lilac, these are clothes with palpably luxurious heft.
Ironically, that it should be released so close to the previous collection only underscores that no matter the season—and no matter what gently disruptive tweaks she brings to the mix—the beauty of Burton’s menswear lies in its timelessness.
1 July 2022
Alexander McQueen presented this collection at a store appointment back on April 13, 75 days ago, before releasing these images today. It never seems logical to write a review that is going to be held for who-knows-how-long—anything could change in the meantime—which leaves the only alternative to look back at clothes that have long since receded in the experiential rearview. The collection was conceived in parallel with the pre-fallcollectionthat was presented later but released earlier; unlike that collection there were no accompanying artworks, however.Similarities included a fair isle knit (but monochrome) and a dress, one shouldered and purposefully crumpled, that was worn over a t-shirt and pants. On beaded suiting and Cuban heeled boots, there was also a menswear run for the initials of the McQueen showroom team and other scribbled fancies, love hearts and the like, that were reproduced in embroidered pin and crystal and also seen in pre-fall.Pants with in-built jacket lapel skirts, blown up heatmap decoration in vibrant colors on suiting and outerwear, graffiti jacquards, and a trench in the same crumple-treated material as the season’s man-dress were other elements that lived in the memory. McQueen’s codes remain consistent even as the chronology of its coding bends and fluctuates from season to season.
27 June 2022
Around Christmas, Sarah Burton and her team at McQueen sent images of this released-today pre-collection to 12 women artists, along with a proposal. The artists were asked to select any and as many items in the collection as they liked to use as a starting point for a McQueen-commissioned piece of art. Today the results were installed in the brand’s Bond Street flagship, alongside the collection itself. As Burton said via press release: “I wanted to engage in a new creative dialogue with the collection this season and see how the artists interpreted the work that we created in the studio. It’s been very interesting to see how creativity has sprung from so many different perspectives, and the outcomes that have been varied and beautiful.”How we respond to art is as subjective as our response to dress: the pieces I personally would most have liked to hang in my living room include Hope Gangloff’s portrait of her serendipitously named friend Caitlin MacQueen wearing the patched denim dress of look 16, Marcia Kure’s painting and fascinator installationThe Amina Projectthat sprung from the look 30 dress featuring the McQueen studio teams’ initials embroidered in crystal and silver on Chantilly lace, and Beverly Semmes’s simultaneously funny and fascinating pieceMarigold, which blew up the exploded neckline marigold corset dress of look 1 into a physical manifestation of a psychological state (featuring a Labrador).These and the nine other also-excellent pieces will remain on display in London for at least a further fortnight before going on tour to other McQueen locations yet to be confirmed. As a collaborative device, the project was a neat way of interrogating through adjacency the established hierarchy of artforms (which for reasons that for sure involve sexism place fashion very low), while emphasizing female dialogue, community, and expression.What would be especially fascinating to see is a development of this artistic dialogue into a fully-fledged conversation, with Burton and her team working to interpret elements of the art—such as The Amina Project’s stormy canvas and artist Ann Cathrin November Høibo’s moody tapestry—into future pieces. But even as a one-off experiment, this was an interesting twist.
7 June 2022
Lee Alexander McQueen brought his show to New York twice, first in 1996 with Dante and again in 1999 for Eye. The 1999 show will go down as among the wettest in fashion history, with torrential rain flooding the streets and a runway submerged in several inches of water. Sarah Burton was with him on both trips, and she was back in New York tonight to present her fall 2022 collection for the label. “America and New York have always been so much a part of McQueen,” she said backstage. “It feels part of our creative community. It’s great to honor that.”This show was rooted in the elements, as well, though it wasn’t water that was her focus, but earth. Piles of mulch made from fallen trees gave off a peaty tang in the Brooklyn warehouse venue (it’ll be reused in plantings, she said), and birds and insects chirped on the speakers before the soundtrack settled into the groove of “A Forest” by The Cure. Backstage Burton was talking about mycelium, the underground fungal network that’s sometimes called nature’s “wood wide web,” connecting trees with one another and transferring nutrients and minerals plant-to-plant.The humble mushroom has taken on a new vogue in recent years with the mainstreaming of psychedelics, but Burton laughed off a question about microdosing. “What I really love is that the trees talk to each other and they sort of heal each other,” she began. “The thing is, they’re healing, but they’re toxic as well. There’s a danger to them.” A pair of dresses were fantastically embroidered in mushrooms whose vivid colors Burton said were lifted from real life, their mycelia represented by long skeins of silk fringe. She might as well have been dosing so lysergic was their effect. A couple of unraveling sweaters were almost as trippy.Burton’s McQueen is a thoughtful balance of hand craft and haute tailleur. She was in New York City, after all, so she didn’t neglect to show off the label’s sartorialism. A smoking with a crystal-embellished back panel and a spangled bandeau in place of a shirt would be a glamorously restrained red carpet look for what’s likely to be a sober Oscars ceremony at the end of the month. Other sharply cut pantsuits picked up the psychedelic colors of those mushrooms—acid green and yellow, electric blue, bright red. “I wanted it to have a pace to it and an energy to it… and there to be color,” Burton said. “I wanted it to have a vibrancy.
”Most notable were the suits that looked like they’d been spray-painted with the shadow of a rushing body. Burton said these were inspired by yet another archival McQueen collection, Number 13, the show in which the model Shalom Harlow and her strapless white dress were painted by a pair of robots normally used in the automotive industry in a sort of erotic dance.McQueen would’ve likely dug the mycelium; he was always intrigued by the elements, always finding his way back to a nature vs. machine theme. Many years on, that struggle is more real than ever. Burton brings that awareness and a woman-centered approach to what she’s doing here. Though no mushroom leather was used in the collection she said she and her team are running trials with it and with other substitute leathers, and that 85% of the collection’s materials were upcycled. Asked about her day-after-the-show itinerary, she said, “What you forget about is the light in New York, the light is so clear and sharp. Tomorrow, before she heads back to London, she has a plan: “I’d like to go see the light.”
15 March 2022
Some of this lovely Alexander McQueen womenswear collection you might have already seen—onmen. That’s because it was launched in sync with the spring 2022 menswear collection from the house, with which it shared many pieces and strands of common thought. The wonderful use of William Blake illustrations, the sinuously zipped tailoring, and the sporty racer-back embroidered dress were just a few of these beyond-gender overlaps.The rhythm of Sarah Burton’s work here also played against the visual cantos of another collection,spring 2022, which was presented after this collection but made public before it. These included the nipped waist; full-skirted, recontextualized, ’50s-silhouette dresses—some with bombastically ruffled shoulders; and the rigorously constructed and precisely powerful pieces in black leather. More broadly, in the photographing of both there was evident deliberation in matching look and wearer in order to amplify the individuality of personality.When you zoom out even further, that show in the sky and this Blakean ode were both utterly consistent yet fresh reinventions of the in-house canon of creativity that is the legacy of Alexander McQueen himself and the métier of Burton, his closest creative confidante and ongoing posthumous propagator. Blake once said, “My business is to create.” Business is thriving, chez Alexander McQueen.
15 November 2021
Look up, says Sarah Burton. See the sky. For her first real-life Alexander McQueen show since the pandemic crashed down on humanity, she gathered people to a carpark rooftop in the East End of London, for an encounter with the aerial powers of nature: “a show in the sky.”It was a metaphor inspired by the spectacular rolling skies that she and the McQueen team see from the studio every day, and yet equally grounded in her new sense of dealing with the reality of the here-and-now. “There’s that sense that the sky is ever-changing—this constant change that’s uncontrollable. Some days it can be kind of very calm, a very beautiful dappled sky. And then this kind of ferocious sky,” she observed. “And I’ve been thinking about what we've all been through: this constant feeling that you don’t know what the next day is going to be. And how you have to just face it with bravery. The fact is, we’re not in control of the situation. Nature is more powerful than us. Sun, rain, storm—whatever comes, you have to just keep going.”The British weather played its part as if on cue. The transparent cloud-like Smiljan Radic-designed bubble of the McQueen tent was pierced with brilliant sunshine at the beginning of the show—the perfect backdrop for dresses printed with photographic images of sunrises and dazzling blue skies and clouds which the McQueen team had captured from the studio balcony.The weather theme leant form to snowy-white cumulus sleeves ruched into a taffeta parka-dress and a blouse. A voluminous wind-blown trench coat was followed by a ray-of-sunshine wisp of a dress in off-the-shoulder yellow tulle. Sparkling crystal “raindrop” embroidery splashed brilliantly on the shoulders of a tweed jacket; the skirt of a tank dress swished with blue rivulets of fringed pailletes. And just as “night” fell on three glamorous black finale looks, the London skies turned a threatening leaden gray.But the last thing Burton wanted to convey was purely head-in-the-clouds escapism. It would have been too easy to carry through a show that was only a prettily themed series of this-looks-like-that under the business-as-usual untruth that nothing has been changed by the experience of working through the pandemic. “I didn’t want to get on that train,” she said.
12 October 2021
The poet, artist, and visionary William Blake once described peace as “the human dress.” In this menswear collection the designer Sarah Burton applied Blake’s visual imagery to serve that written imagery by incorporating it into items of menswear. These items included one actual dress, conventionally “womenswear” but here presented as “menswear.” Its top was rib-framed, racerback-shaped, and fashioned of a beautifully-embroidered Blake reproduction, and its asymmetric skirt was built from ripped strips of organza, tulle, and chiffon in graduating fades of blue.The image reproduced here and across several other collection pieces was Blake’s illustration of Canto 29 of Dante Alighieri’sThe Divine Comedy, which Burton and her team consulted in collaboration with theTate. As that link relates, the Canto describes and illustration depicts Dante’s meeting in purgatory with his long dead beloved, Beatrice, who is being drawn by a Griffin. In a way you could suggest this dress, too, was a depiction of a type of middle ground, between and beyond gender, in which the masculine and feminine were united as a “human dress.”The Canto 29 image was also jacquarded onto a topcoat and a jacket, intarsia’d into a sweater, and printed on a wonderful ruffled artist’s shirt meets art-collector’s blouse with matching pant—Burton’s Dante eye was obviously drawn to both the Griffin and Beatrice. Another Blakean image, a frontispiece bearing the name Alexander McQueen and featuring a pensive skeleton, was embroidered onto a vest and printed onto a smock-like cotton button-up shirt.Away from Blake a ruffled jacket was another exploration of the space between conventionally gendered archetypes in dress code. Zippers curled around arms or acted as darting as another functionally decorative brushstroke designed to pique your perception of release and restraint. There was an underlying doubleness theme explored in an ingeniously double lapeled tailored jacket and a double-fronted leather trench. The men’s jewelry was also beautiful, and there was a handbag on offer that—a bit like that dress, one imagines—was simply a sized up edition of its womenswear equivalent. Image and imagination were interwoven here in this fine Blake-flavored collection of human dress by Sarah Burton and her team.
21 July 2021
It was to convey the healing powers of nature that Sarah Burton chose anemones and water as recurring motifs in her Alexander McQueen collection. This is the kind of poetry and beauty that got her through the darkness of the past year. Seeing her creations up close during an in-store appointment in Old Bond Street—one ballroom dress after another—you’d be forgiven for forgetting the pandemic ever happened.“It feels like now is a time for healing, for breathing new life, for exploring echoes from the past to enrich our future,” Burton wrote in a statement. “More than ever, a sense of humanity, of the team working together with a single aim—to make something beautiful, something meaningful—feels both precious and important.”She had crushed up photographs of anemones, photographed them again, and transferred the images onto gigot-sleeve poly faille gowns worthy of Empress Sisi. Certainly, the virus has done little to quench the savoir faire thirst of the world’s couture clients, but Burton’s otherworldly dresses felt like more than a mere reminder that this appetite still exists. It was a big, blown-up anemone-adorned message that no virus gets in the way of this dressmaker’s desires.Captured romantically by Paolo Roversi, the regal volumes evolved into the hybrids Burton has been exercising for some time now. Glamorously structured denim dresses were spliced with woolen peacoats, a herringbone suit hooked up with the majestic sleeves of a bomber jacket, and the spirit of biker jackets possessed the bustiers of dresses and the zipped pleats of skirts. Some looks were made to look hybridized from separates, but the impact was the same.Even a white T-shirt, the eternal casual wardrobe staple, was decked out to the nines with an asymmetrical overlay couture-ified with “trailing water lily” embroideries in metal and sequins. Styled over a trouser with a trainer—a reference to Lee McQueen’s Sarabande collection—that look demonstrated how Burton’s fineries might translate into a more practical wardrobe. Not that fashion needs to be practical, but in a time when our shopping habits have been derailed, there’s a real sense of looking to designers for clothes that fit our return to reality.A series of lightweight knitted dresses and tailoring lightly cinched with Victorian eyelet lacing at the back leaned closer against an everyday interpretation of Burton’s grandeur, similarly grounded by the ease of stomp-y Chelsea boots and squashy leather bags.
For all their ballroom splendor, her garments never looked constricting. Alongside a number of sustainable measures, that fact spoke to Burton’s reflections on a post-pandemic sensibility. Now, many of us long for the true emotional experience of seeing clothes like these on real bodies and real runways once again.
8 June 2021
This Alexander McQueen collection contained so many brushstrokes of nuance and reference that you were left itching to hear the design rationale behind them unstitched. Sarah Burton’s team is well-prepped, welcoming, and good eggs in general, yet seeing a collection as rich as this without that creator’s take seems like listening to a song with great lyrics played instrumentally. The sparse release notes asserted a “focus on silhouette,” and once you got beyond top notes including the sweetly naif early abstract-aping papercut prints and nicely spliced hybrid garments that also featured heavily in women’s pre-fall, it was these experiments in outline that lingered most in the memory.Typical to the house was tailoring that blended the ceremonial with the severe and was resistant to timestamping: a pair of gray flannels that featured double pleating and a sculpturally cut inhalation south of the knee was a pant especially worth panting for. Just as those hybrid garments more readably conjoined conventionally siloed forms of menswear—tailoring and denim, and so on— so this collection appeared more loosely to collide periods of menswear. Interplaying currents in the informal wear saw a relatively classic bomber teamed with straight-leg high-rise denim and styled in a medley of Kamen-esque Buffalo and rockabilly, and beyond both of them Ivy League. High-waisted but cinched at the ankle submariner pants worn against pec-promoting knits evoked a slightly Puritan redux of the piratical post-punk London New Romanticism that my colleague Laird Borrelli-Persson has been excavating so interestingly of late: Sort of Adam Ant meetsCaptain Sensible, but much more sensible.The components of these finally drawn collages included many straightforwardly seductive garments, including bicolor intarsia Aran-esque knits and an outrageously cool bomber cape coat in black silk satin with a cinched waist and those print reliefs in metal embroidery that was total frontman material. Even unsung, this collection’s melodic plays on shape and association beguiled.
20 May 2021
One of Alexander McQueen’s many dichotomies was to be simultaneously staunchly English and fiercely proud of his Scottish roots. So reviewing any collection made in his name right now creates a tempting peg upon which to contemplate the ironies inherent in the post-Brexit, Union-busting schism that may well lie ahead. Looking at this collection, however, all that hoo-ha flew out the window as serenely as the (Matisse-y) doves that featured on satchels, shirting, and hand-crocheted knits.This season saw Sarah Burton and her team observe its go-to McQueen dichotomy in a plethora of hybrid garments that countered formal against informal and frothy against severe. Examples included a high-waist peak lapel tailored coat in wool conjoined with a poly-faille parka peplum; shirting and shirt-dresses in crisp white cotton poplin countered by poly-something sections of sporty rib at the cuff and waist; and a camel coat spliced against MA-1 bomber arms. Unlike the many other hybridists out there—gathered most densely in Japan—this McQueen team always counters the apparent anarchy of its garment clashes with a rigidly enforced symmetry akin to the protocols that still adhere in Savile Row.These forced unions of adjacent but distinct cultural traditions in clothing worked well enough, yet this collection flew highest when focusing on pieces whose raison d’être was less about telegraphing meaning and more about being wonderful to wear and watch. These wonderful pieces included sweetheart neckline, puff-sleeved, and mega-skirted dresses in scarlet and ultramarine; dresses that paired sculptured scuba-material bodices with more expansively gathered skirting; and open-backed V-neck dresses in pink or red. Teamed with a badass boot and a handful or two of McQueen’s tough and tender jewelry, they made for looks in which to seize the present by the scruff of its neck and make unapologetic hay.
13 May 2021
If the Thames riverbank reminds you of either Alfred Hitchcock’sFrenzyorSpice World: the Movie, Alexander McQueen’s foray into the fashion film-scape won’t soon disappoint. Sinister and Brit-tastic all at once, Sarah Burton’s collection clip—created by the director Jonathan Glazer—is extremely up for interpretation. Between the women pushing through the murky river in their ball gowns, the couple kissing under the bridge, and the search party possibly looking for all of them, it could be a romantic teen horror flick, or, a very stylized documentary about the forgotten youth. Do you know where your children are? Because they could be under a bridge, wearing a McQueen hybrid between a debutante dress and a biker jacket.In her collection notes, Burton—who declined interviews this season—expressed a newfound desire for purity: “Shape, silhouette, and volume, the beauty of the bare bones of clothing stripped back to its essence—a world charged with emotion and human connection.” The film considered, you could liken her words to the way many Londoners felt when they first saw the nakedness of the city’s streets during lockdown. Unable to pursue her fabled research trips around Great Britain this year, it felt as if Burton had lost herself in the stark solitude of the stripped-down capital, and noticed in it a beauty you rarely get to see.If those impressions informed her collections (she showed men’s pre-fall with women’s spring), it was expressed in a muted approach to her favorite recurring elements. Gone was the vivid decoration that often fills her surfaces. Instead, Burton let her construction speak for itself, zoning in on the hybridization native to the Alexander McQueen code book. In this department, there was little sign of restraint. Like the Edward Scissorhands of wardrobe mutation, she left no garment un-spliced: A biker jacket married cocoon-shaped tulle sleeves and a ballroom skirt, a Crombie coat fused with an MA-1 jacket, and a poplin dress mutated with a pique shirt.It was a constant conversation between past and present, menswear and womenswear, and the uniforms we’ve adapted into city-wear. “In many ways it felt like going back to the beginning for me, like it was in the early days at McQueen. At that time, we had less resources and all had to be very hands-on,” Burton told me this summer, talking about her creative process during lockdown.
You could see the spirit of resourcefulness in the way she pieced together her garments, but on a more concrete level, many pieces had been created with overstock too.“For both the men’s and women’s collections, I made a decision early on in lockdown only to use fabrics that we already had; print on them, reinvent them, and make them feel new,” Burton said. She demonstrated it no more poignantly than in a trompe l’oeil butterfly-draped bustier dress printed with scans of those same pieces, allowing their folds and creases to serve as decoration. “I believe that it is our responsibility to protect the things we love from the past, to preserve our values, signatures, and history, but it is also our job to innovate,” she said. “There is comfort in familiarity and excitement in experimentation. The two coexist.”
16 December 2020
If the Thames riverbank reminds you of either Alfred Hitchcock’sFrenzyorSpice World: the Movie, Alexander McQueen’s foray into the fashion film-scape won’t soon disappoint. Sinister and Brit-tastic all at once, Sarah Burton’s collection clip—created by the director Jonathan Glazer—is extremely up for interpretation. Between the women pushing through the murky river in their ball gowns, the couple kissing under the bridge, and the search party possibly looking for all of them, it could be a romantic teen horror flick, or, a very stylized documentary about the forgotten youth. Do you know where your children are? Because they could be under a bridge, wearing a McQueen hybrid between a debutante dress and a biker jacket.In her collection notes, Burton—who declined interviews this season—expressed a newfound desire for purity: “Shape, silhouette, and volume, the beauty of the bare bones of clothing stripped back to its essence—a world charged with emotion and human connection.” The film considered, you could liken her words to the way many Londoners felt when they first saw the nakedness of the city’s streets during lockdown. Unable to pursue her fabled research trips around Great Britain this year, it felt as if Burton had lost herself in the stark solitude of the stripped-down capital, and noticed in it a beauty you rarely get to see.If those impressions informed her collections (she showed men’s pre-fall with women’s spring), it was expressed in a muted approach to her favorite recurring elements. Gone was the vivid decoration that often fills her surfaces. Instead, Burton let her construction speak for itself, zoning in on the hybridization native to the Alexander McQueen code book. In this department, there was little sign of restraint. Like the Edward Scissorhands of wardrobe mutation, she left no garment un-spliced: A biker jacket married cocoon-shaped tulle sleeves and a ballroom skirt, a Crombie coat fused with an MA-1 jacket, and a poplin dress mutated with a pique shirt.It was a constant conversation between past and present, menswear and womenswear, and the uniforms we’ve adapted into city-wear. “In many ways it felt like going back to the beginning for me, like it was in the early days at McQueen. At that time, we had less resources and all had to be very hands-on,” Burton told me this summer, talking about her creative process during lockdown.
You could see the spirit of resourcefulness in the way she pieced together her garments, but on a more concrete level, many pieces had been created with overstock too.“For both the men’s and women’s collections, I made a decision early on in lockdown only to use fabrics that we already had; print on them, reinvent them, and make them feel new,” Burton said. She demonstrated it no more poignantly than in a trompe l’oeil butterfly-draped bustier dress printed with scans of those same pieces, allowing their folds and creases to serve as decoration. “I believe that it is our responsibility to protect the things we love from the past, to preserve our values, signatures, and history, but it is also our job to innovate,” she said. “There is comfort in familiarity and excitement in experimentation. The two coexist.”
16 December 2020
During her parlay with Sarah Mower forVogue’s Forces of Fashion summit last month, Sarah Burton spoke about the inherently democratic process of the house. This began at the shared cutting table McQueen and his team used when she first joined, and ran through to the exhibition and workspace—open to all—recently established in the attic of the brand’s Bond Street store. “There is no hierarchy of ideas. It’s a really collaborative process,” Burton said.As in McQueen’s most-recent resort collection, this closely connected menswear offering expressed that community philosophy most explicitly through the reuse of its design team’s sketches as a print, in this case on look 31’s Fred Astaire tailcoat meets Phil Daniels fishtail parka. Also as in that womenswear—as well as in the flinty black accents that punctuated the cliff-face backdrop of this shoot—these were pieces whose surface exposed the geology of the thinking and provenance behind them.Pleasingly excavatable examples included jackets hybridized to combine black biker facades within scarlet jersey bomber construction, cricket sweaters whose mysterious black ooze would never be tolerated on the field of play, and a double-breasted jacket whose traditional ticket pockets survived the transfer to black leather. Dip-dyed dégradé color divisions, bold ribbon details, and layered, opaque “skeleton” prints were also carried over from resort to menswear. Worn against a distorted Breton stripe sweater and white shorts, a sportily informal logo-strap canvas gym bag was probably the clearest point of separation between the two here: Otherwise, Burton and McQueen’s both-gender exercise in democratic was kept in strict alignment. This value carried through to the substance of a collection that—again, just like its seasonal sister—was predominantly made of upcycled overstock fabrics.
7 December 2020
Next Monday, November 16, at 9:50 a.m. ET Sarah Burton is due to join Vogue Runway’s chief critic Sarah Mower for a 35-minute conversation that will mark the first session of this year’s Forces of Fashion summit. Like so much else in 2020, FoF has migrated from IRL to digital, and it promises to be well worth a window on your desktop. Anyone seeking some direct-from-designer insight about this attractively photographed pre-collection by Burton and her team is especially urged to jump on the stream.As per the notes that accompanied these look book images this morning: “This collection was designed during lockdown. It is made predominantly out of stock fabric: overprinted, overdyed—renewed.” The result was photographed on a beach along what looks like a section of southern England’s Jurassic Coast, an area long renowned as a fruitful source of fossils. Both in material substance (as outlined in that statement) and creative expression, that location seemed pertinent to the clothes. This was a new McQueen collection in which many long-standing preoccupations of the house were both preserved and evolved.The process of production was transformed into product on an Edith Head–worthy one-shouldered gown whose silk skin was printed with sketches made while preparing this collection: “London,” “lace edge,” “bride,” and “wildflowers” were some of the cursive clues dropped in around the silhouettes. A gabardine trench was spliced at the front with tailoring cotton, black suiting was disrupted by fiery fuchsia bows, and a biker was refashioned as a dress . All these were 2021 updates of McQueen’s ongoing exploration of hybridization and cross-pollination in dress. Violent dip-dyed dégradé color transitions and filtered screen-print-y rose reliefs deepened the impression of creative layering—thought process applied over thought process. Even in 2D the richness of texture was apparent. This latest stage in McQueen’s evolution appeared a natural selection for the year of change to come.
12 November 2020
This pre-fall Alexander McQueen collection was shown to editors in London on February 4, before Everything happened. Now that Everything has happened—and Anything else seems set to—how does Sarah Burton’s latest stand up as it begins to become available (a month or so late) on sale?Pretty well, actually. These clothes might pre-date 2020’s double whammy—a flood of calamity followed by a tide of righteous reckoning—yet far from appearing antediluvian relics they are arguably more on point now than then. That’s because many of the considerations that Burton and her team embed in the material of their work—traceability, cultural identity, spirituality, sustainability, the appropriation of masculine tropes to articulate feminine power—have become less abstract and more tangible considerations in the unsparing light of Everything.Working closely with British mills, McQueen developed lighter versions of conventionally heavier suiting fabrics—Donegal tweed, Prince of Wales, etc.—then cut and pasted them for contrast in garments whose contours echoed the fossil shapes of suiting reveres and darting. Worn north of swooping asymmetric hemlines punctuated by wide, deliberately languid ruffles the result was gender-transcendent power attire. These collar contrasts continued into leather dresses, playing burnt orange against caramel, a category that also encompassed all-caramel Boadicea wear—an unconscious reminder of when Britain was colonized and rose up (hopelessly) against the ‘civilizing’ sandal of Rome.Lace dresses and tuxedo pantsuits similarly featured thoughtfully spliced samples of traditional suiting techniques. Alongside the layered-pattern knits or the contrasting of bright mineral colors against matte, iron-ore grays these added up to a rich seam of reference. Both the needle-punched pieces shivering with thousands of differently colored hand-applied ribbons, and the rib knit dresses—very contoured—inspired by schlumpy menswear cardigans reinforced the kaleidoscopic imaginative diversity of Burton’s source material. By excavating ancient themes and employing traditional techniques while refashioning the contrasting as the complementary, Burton is crafting clothes of a rare authenticity and resilience—warrior-wear of impeccable provenance.
25 June 2020
“What do you talk about in a time when there’s so much noise?” queried Sarah Burton during final fittings on the eve of presenting Alexander McQueen fall. “I wanted this collection to be really grounded, bold, and heroic,” she answered herself. “I feel like you need to be heroic.”Burton’s poetic adventure began with a visit to Wales, the storied Celtic land of myths and creativity. At St. Fagans National Museum of History in the capital city of Cardiff, the first thing that caught her eye was the Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt, fashioned at night over a 10-year period from 1842 by a tailor using recycled scraps of the woolen cloths he had used to craft the uniforms he made by day. With its scenes from the Bible and allusions to the Industrial Revolution that was threatening the very idea of handcraft at the time, it is a powerful object, “a narrative of someone’s life,” as Burton said. Taking her cue from this inspirational starting point, she worked on sharp-seamed, graphic tailoring that incorporated upcycled wool flannels from previous McQueen seasons woven in British mills and set in dramatic geometric blocks that suggested flags or heraldic pennants. The Victorian tailor’s startlingly contemporary imagery was reflected in prints and complex intarsia treatments.Lee McQueen himself used antique patchworks as a source for some textile treatments in his spring 2004 “Deliverance” collection (unforgettably presented as a 1930s styleThey Shoot Horses, Don’t They?dance marathon), and Burton and her team found further quilt inspiration in the collection of the dealer Jen Jones, including more examples made from scraps of traditional men’s fabrics and others in soft blush pinks also used for the elaborately stitched but unseen petticoats that Welsh women once wore to buoy up their plain, utilitarian skirts. That complex handwork was replicated in dimensional jacquard weaves used for a coat with the allure of a 1940s diva’s dressing robe, or as a deep border to counterpoint the severe tailoring of a shapely black jacket. Fabric innovations also included dégradé treatments that changed from solid to sheer (taffeta to chiffon, or dense to spiderweb fine-gauge knit), suggesting strength and fragility in one garment.There were further Welsh inspirations in the form of the strident red used in the national costume, in the famed Welsh blankets, and even for the façades of buildings, a color signifying protection, healing, and power.
On the runway the girls’ hair, swathed round the head as tight as swimming caps, was ignited with strips of that powerful red used in the clothing.
2 March 2020
Heritage, nature, artistry, and narrow-waisted suiting: Alexander McQueen’s menswear this season was as rich in reference as it was austere in silhouette. Sarah Burton and her team roamed north from the Henry Moore studio in Hertfordshire, England, to the thistle-strewn Highlands of Scotland on a trip that began with a house reference: the skull.Artist-style overalls and an oversized hand-tufted intarsia sweater were both patterned with fearsome reproductions of the deathly McQueen motif. The artist link led to Moore, with whose foundation Burton worked faithfully to reproduce sweeping illuminated brushstrokes from Three-Quarter Figure (1928), re-engineered on wool suits and a topcoat, as well as a tufted sweater.The McQueen journey north was likely via motorcycle: the biker jackets and asymmetric shearlings (one red example was fashioned from five different leathers) played strongly at the presentation in Milan this morning. Once dismounted and cèilidh-ready there wastrompe l’oeilbicolor but also rainbow-flecked Donegal suiting, other suits in a silver-versus-gold degrade, thistle-illustrated shirting, and some spectacular suiting inset with hand-embroidered abstract metallic swirls. For the morning after there was a satisfyingly punky, Renton-esque (Trainspotting, people) oversized Scottish flag sweater, with rakers added to make it argyle. As ever, the product at McQueen was irreproachable and true to its own spirit—which made it feel a pity that menswear (surely not a category to be marginalized) lacks the storytelling focus afforded its fiercely beautiful runway-shown sister.
12 January 2020
Britain’s most numerous metaphorical bloom is the shrinking violet: A well-reported story here this week asserted that 47% of Britons identify as shy and 10% as very shy. Just in time, then, for Sarah Burton and her talented team at Alexander McQueen to arrange a highly potent wearable botanical remedy for wallflowers everywhere.For how could you not feel wreathed in confidence wearing a free-moving dress whose rib-knit body grows into a vivid, shaggy eruption of taffeta strips in magenta or crimson? Or a similarly conceived orange tweed-topped coat that mutates into two lower levels of taffeta? Or an incredible corseted dress edged with hypersized petals of curved and pleated strips of magenta-tinged taffeta?Many of the floral illustrations in print or embroidered in stitch and pin on satin evening dresses and tailoring were drawn from life in the enormous 19th-century glasshouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. The subjects of these drawings were specifically flowers in danger of extinction. Others were based on flowers that are already extinct but which the McQueen team was able to observe dead, pressed, and desiccated in the Kew herbarium.This complemented Burton’s ongoing focus on (and radical refiguring of) British tailoring heritage, as well as her championing of sustainable practice and conservation. (All those aforementioned crocheted taffeta strips, for instance, were sourced from stock bolts of fabric.) There were also nods to long-term McQueen tropes, including the whipstitch detailing on the plentiful harvest of badass lace-lined, godet-paneled leather pieces. Militaria returned in a hybrid biker-and-dress-uniform jacket that contrasted olive drab with magenta and came with grosgrain-effect piping upon which was printed a new house emblem that looks like a walnut crossed with a scarab and that incorporates the lettersAMQ.Elsewhere were some uniform pieces for more day-to-day displays of McQueen militancy and two new handbags, one named the Story and the other the Tall Story. The real narrative here, though, centered on Burton’s botanically weaponized ready-to-wear: the perfect armor for any shrinking violet set on blossoming into a tall poppy totally immune to pruning.
14 November 2019
At the close of Sarah Burton’s “pared down” yet nonetheless monumental Spring 2020 collection for Alexander McQueen, the designer took her bow trailed by a seemingly endless procession of McQueen staffers. The members of the London Contemporary Orchestra kept playing the modern classical piece composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge (sister of Phoebe) for the show. The audience kept clapping and cheering. No one rushed out of the venue, even though it was late and dinner beckoned. Time took a breather, essentially.And, wonderfully enough, this was the message Burton hoped to achieve with her offering this season. As she wrote in her voluminous show notes, “I love the idea of people having the time to make things together, the time to meet and talk together, the time to reconnect to the world.” In practice what this amounted to was that the entire McQueen staff—not just the studio but even the HR department—completely hand-embroidered two of the dresses shown on the catwalk. Inspired by a London group called the Stitch School, which teaches boys and girls needlework, the staff sat together and chain stitched and silk knotted over the line drawings of Central Saint Martins students, who had sketched on a single giant sheet during a life drawing class at the McQueen store in London. All of those students were credited in the show notes. Talk about community spirit!And talk about a value-rich backstory. Here are a few things one needs to know about Burton’s 42 designs shown tonight. She upcycled lace, organza, and tulle from prior seasons. She recycled and reinvented old patterns from both her and Alexander McQueen’s history. She worked primarily with linen from Northern Ireland and linen made from flax grown at a particular female-owned farm—a farm that had until recently housed livestock. She created damasks with the sole remaining linen weaver in Ireland. She created lustrous, light-as-paper linens with the sole remaining beetler in Ireland (beetling is a process in which linen is covered in potato starch and then pounded on a wood machine for hours on end). She designed embroideries of vivid, blooming endangered flowers for a dress of silk faille and an ivory suit. As with her Fall 2019 offering, Burton cut her tailoring from British mohair sharkskin, a worsted wool from mills in the north of England. Local, repurposed, conscious, artisanal.
30 September 2019
Sarah Burton wasn’t at this presentation, but she didn’t really need to be: the clothes were an evocative articulation of where she is as a designer now and the journey she’s taken to get here. A predominantly sartorial collection—some mohair sweaters in oversize abstract florals and a mean-looking studded perfecto/trench aside—it was in some ways a direct continuation of Fall’s wonderful womenswear in its emphasis on Englishness, both in terms of provenance and the potential for subversion in suiting. Strips of black wool used to create a long ruffle-skirted jacket with cut stones and stud detailing over the left pectoral were entirely sourced from upcycled off-cuts from the McQueen cutting room floor. Another jacket, in quietly conflicting widths of pinstripe, featured an eye-snagging false collar beneath the left lapel that made for a double single-breasted effect.There were suits in blazing white broderie anglaise and full-on fuchsia mohair (both great looks to get married in) and another, this one black, with inlaid panels of black lace (perfect for the party after). The collection also looked back, way back, to evoke the period in which Burton and Lee McQueen would travel to Japan on inspiration trips. The half-kilted jackets were, in part, a nod to McQueen himself as well as continuation of a house shape. Further expressions of the house’s decorative ways included embroidered dragons on the back of double-layered jackets; pressed-flower embroideries on the hems of scarf-attached shirting; the bleeding-color Rorschach florals that featured on suits; and trenches. The models wore metal-set crystal pendants and earrings for good vibes, plus leather shoes and sneakers with steroidal-accentuated tread soles for extra size. As in all good McQueen collections, there was an undertow of the unsettling behind the beauty at the surface—a satisfying whisper of the sinister.
9 June 2019
Division and Britain go hand in hand, especially now. Four countries bolted together (for the moment) as one, near equally inhabited by Remainers and Leavers, it’s a nation united by disunity. For this Pre-Fall collection Sarah Burton and her team looked to England’s north—eternally polarized against England’s south—to build a collection of clothes that strikingly combined a collage of contrasting regional elements into an innovative and harmonious whole.Burton, a Maxonian, counts as a bona fide northerner and the north-sourced ingredients she rallied here were broader than the outstanding rose-strewn, tailoring-focused (and furthering) Fall collection. Here, the cut crystals threaded upon a sleeveless house-shouldered tailored jacket and strung along the surface of layered lace and tulle dresses were nods to the grandiose chandeliers of Blackpool’s great gilded ballrooms. The occasional crystal on multi-buttoned cardigan or spike-toed loafers were imagined as earrings lost in a particularly passionate cha-cha-cha.That jacket and almost every other in the collection were cut with a low skirt, a semi-peaked lapel, and a single button, then placed above triple-pleated peg-leg pants to muster a silhouette meant as tribute to the Neo-Edwardian style of northern 1950s teddy girls. Some of the suits came in a silk-printed rip-edged photo collage of rose images, both as tribute to those evergreen floral symbols of the north—Lancashire v. York—and the album art of Factory Records. The rose motif rambled through the collection, reappearing as embroideries on jackets or metallic relief on powdery pink, nylon-shot silk jacquard suits and a deconstructed bodice top with side skirt. A washed silk duchesse dress in the collage print featured a Victorian bustle back (as a nod to the Brontës) with a tulle-pumped, exploded couture-style sleeve (back to the ballroom), while a long white waffle cotton shirtdress referenced the made-in-Manchester suffragette movement.At the end of the rail, evening suits featured painstakingly assembled sequin portraits of cormorants, one of the symbols of Liverpool. This McQueen collection was a soulfully northern exercise in comparison, collision, and ultimate integration that will find an audience way beyond the boundaries of its reference.
16 May 2019
Take either the M1 or the A1 freeway out of London and you’ll soon see signs that read almost like a warning: “The North.” England’s historical and cultural north/south divide is as entrenched as that of Westeros. For this collection Macclesfield-raised Sarah Burton (this makes her a northerner) transported the McQueen aesthetic away from soft, southern London and up toward the rugged heartlands of her upbringing.As in the most recent womenswear collection, there was a heavy leaning on the sartorial that showcased the virtuosity of the Yorkshire textile mills with which McQueen partnered. The fiercest suits featured tooth both hound and puppy, blended and mashed into competing sections of check and pattern. When worn under oversize overcoats in more blown-up houndstooth, these looks were as intense on the eye as a Bridget Riley canvas.More suits came in bold, cock-of-the-walk checks with startling stripes of blue and pink: Mighty fine Fancy Dan fare when teamed with strong-collared silk shirting in check-complementing colors. The glinting crystal necklaces and earrings and crystal-stringed jackets were presented as homages to the glamour of Blackpool’s ballrooms, and pink, burgundy, or blue silk jacquard suits featured metallic rose emblems, symbols so significant to the history of north/south relations that a war was named after them. A beautifully finished gabardine trench came lined in a torn-collage rose print that featured throughout the collection, either as print or embroidery.Burton also mined earthier attire than suiting. On a foundation of exaggerated-soled monkey boots she recast the donkey jacket in brushed wool and shrunk the parka to much punkier proportions than usual. There were boilersuits in dahlia pink silk and black leather; strapped officer great coats, vaguely sinister, in black leather; and a funnily hardcore-mumsy mix of housecoats in painted check over leathers: whenCoronation Streetmet Carnaby Street.If you looked hard at those leather great coats you could make out the faintest patterned relief: On jacquard suits, trousers, and jackets was a pretty enlarged Sheffield lace pattern whose boldness here functioned as the antithesis of the net curtains that inspired it. For rather than screens to twitch and hide behind as you peered out at the neighbors, here the motif made for clothes in which to compel your neighbors to pay admiring attention. This McQueen love letter to the north was way too good not to wear down south.
15 April 2019
In a season in which a certain dark romance has taken hold—mostly in some combination of menswear gestures and fractured, thorny rose prints—Sarah Burton’s Fall 2019 show this evening for Alexander McQueen was exquisitely realized, peerless, and definitive.Let’s begin with her sharp, inventive tailoring. There are trouser suits with a strong but narrow shoulder in which a drape of wool flows from the nipped waistline with a selvage announcing to all:Made in England. There are suits built of two different scales of pinstripes or checks, which, up close, look both classical and punk—no easy trick. There is a tuxedo jacket with an elegantly slashed shoulder, and another in black wool silk with fuchsia satin sleeves, draped to resemble cascading flower petals.And then let’s talk about those flowers: dresses of black, scarlet, or (yet more) fuchsia taffeta, constructed by a thicket of tucks at the bodice from which explodes wild yardages of fabric sculpted to resemble enormous roses. These are fascinating creations because they proceed entirely from the fine manipulation of a volume of fabric. They are extraordinary—essentially couture—and will no doubt make their way to a red carpet soon, if not worn first by a duchess. Actually, the other roses in the collection—those that are photo printed, overblown, cut up, repurposed, abstracted, and sewn into neat party dresses of duchess (!) satin with sweetheart necklines and Victorian bustles—well, those should be a must-have for that certain royal as well as the rest of us common people. As is always the case at McQueen, there are pieces in the collection for the few (evening dresses with tiers of ruffles attached by functional hook and eyes and embroideries of birds indigenous to the north of England) and others for the many (filmy knits that, from a distance, resemble chiffon; a dress of white denim with a rose at the shoulder and a shredded hem). There’s something otherworldly going on here and something profoundly democratic. . . .Which is not surprising given the backstory. To research this collection, Burton took her team to northern cities outside of Manchester, to Macclesfield, where she was raised, and nearby towns where mills still produce the textiles used for men’s suits in the United Kingdom and abroad. For the show, the audience sat on bolts of fabric from these mills, the very made-in-England wools used in the collection (both for the samples and, ultimately, the production).
Burton wanted to showcase the products, tradition, and culture of the England in which she was raised: the woolens, the local festival traditions (in which there are rose queens), the history of suffrage and its white-clad campaigners, the Brontës (regional heroines), and the codes of punk and new wave, which are ingrained in Burton even if she is too young to have seen Joy Division before it all went tragic. There is a silver dress in the collection that appears to be made of elongated metal paillettes, but the show notes reveal it was made from a loom’s heddles cut into sequins and studded with bugle beads. The noise the dress makes as one walks is meant to mimic the sound of a shop floor. And there is a coat of Prince of Wales check in which the skirt is covered in a swirly, ruffled embroidery made from the scraps of selvage edges left on the cutting room floor.This coat is one of the chicest nods to upcycling in any collection, and perhaps the only instance of upcycling from a major house this season. It is both elegant and relevant. And this is perhaps the real triumph of Burton’s collection. At a time when we need to think local to act globally, she has brought work to the towns of the north (where residents may have voted for the Brexit in large numbers but whose businesses will suffer when it eventually goes through, save for companies such as McQueen). In a moment when we need to reuse and recycle, she has pieced together dresses from remnants and scraps and made embellishments out of industrial materials. And right now, when we need to buy less and buy better (which is the only way to change from a culture of waste to one of value), she has made thoughtful, soulful, beautifully rendered garments that speak volumes about where we have come from and where we are headed. It doesn’t get better than that.
4 March 2019
“She sells seashells on the seashore.” The British Victorian tongue twister is supposed to have been coined about Mary Anning, the heroine of Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen Resort collection. Anning was brought up in Lyme Regis in Dorset (thinkFrench Lieutenant’s Womancountry) and became famous for the fact that at the age of 12, she discovered and identified the first known ichthyosaurus, one of the fossils that pack the crumbling cliffs above what’s now called the Jurassic Coast around Lyme’s beaches. Anning and her family made a living selling fossils to tourists and Victorian gentlemen collectors.Never mind being a designer, the narratives Sarah Burton unearths from the million layers of British history would make a fantastic tour guide to the U.K. (the cheap dollar-pound Brexit exchange rate makes 2019 the ideal time to book your trip). But whoa up, we’re here to talk about clothes. The connection with Victorian collecting is traceable in the mother-of-pearl jewelry, the “conchologist” shell patterns inspired by etchings on tailored suits, and eventually, the configurations of extravagant ripples and ruffles, suggestive of the delicate pinks of the insides of shells.Romance and research aside, this collection—partly shot against clifftop backgrounds—is perfectly in sync with the micro-floral covered-up print dress style that has swept fashion recently, while the Victoriana tailoring and ineffably intricate lace and baby-fine knitting central to McQueen’s appeal continue.
15 November 2018
The voices of women deserve a far bigger hearing—in fashion, as in life. Sarah Burton holds that feeling to heart in a way that strives to connect deep history—eons of it—with the present. This collection was, she said, “about sisterhood, about women’s milestones and rituals: birth, christenings, weddings, funerals. It’s about being strong and emotional, but also saying it’s okay to show your vulnerability; not to have to put a brave face on it.” The first look was symbolic: a super-fragile knitted lace dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves, with what might be interpreted as a blacksmith’s apron belted to its side. Tenderness and strength together.In the pictures, you’ll see what looks like a landscape of huge boulders, partially pasted with posters. Burton’s installation had symbolically brought the standing stones of Avebury—a circle thought to be even older than Stonehenge—to Paris. She is not one to cut and paste her research. The shape of a Victorian wedding dress, bought at Portobello Market, was one source of the show. To find tactile, experiential inspiration for the rest, Burton had led her team out of the enormous new plate-glass offices of Alexander McQueen in London and taken them to see what they saw and felt among the ancient monuments of the English West Country. The flowers—painted, printed, and jacquard-ed—were, she said, from the photographs they took of the hedgerows on the Somerset marshes, where Arthurian legends were supposedly set.The connections between the team’s immersion in pagan, Christian, and natural history and the makings of the clothes might not be immediately visible to the naked eye, but the finesse and power was. Tailoring is literally McQueen’s strong suit—Burton reports it’s selling well—in balance with the romantic dresses the brand is known for. In some of the best pieces, the traces of the original vintage garments were retained, embedded in a black jet-beaded jacket with a canvas back with a bustle, or the boning of a crinoline holding the structure of the puffed sleeves of a cotton voile dress. A white trouser suit had a broderie anglaise cotton blouse falling to an asymmetric flounce, inspired by antique christening dresses.Kudos to Burton, too, that she has expanded her casting to inclusivity of shape and diversity. That’s part of her opening up of Alexander McQueen’s heritage to a new, female-led age for the brand. She is a storyteller, and a passionate one.
In a time when there is so much talk about a return to craft and couture skills, she is making modern fashion to treasure.
1 October 2018
There were loads of great quotes from Sarah Burton after this show, but—just for a change—there was also a fascinating little line in the press notes. It read: “Tailoring forms the backbone to this collection.” In Britain, from where McQueen of course hails,backboneis a euphemism for courage, resilience, and duty. For doing something one does not necessarily care to, but must: England expects.Backbone, and tailoring, can also be an imposed rigidity that acts as a form of disguise and denial of one’s truer, freer urges. It totally applies—or did—to women, too (see: the Royals), and is a product perhaps of mutual disfunction and historically layered denial. But this was a menswear show: the beautiful color-daub prints, similarly daubed models, and fitted-tight biker leathers, brushstroke satin embroideries, and graffiti jacquard or beaded-on-tulle-on-silk suits were all references to the artist Francis Bacon and the photographer John Deakin. Both men were denizens of 1950s Soho, an illicit free space in a Britain where homosexuality was illegal and both were gay.This was a deeply masculine collection that used Bacon and Deakin’s work, time, and context as a broader expression of an exploration of the push and pull between what a man feels he has to be, and what he wants to do. You could see any twisted schizo-sociopath “alpha,” from Dorian Gray to Patrick Bateman, in the exquisitely realized silhouette of the opening executive pieces: single-button topcoats over long-skirted jackets over unfashionably slim but lovely-to-look-at pants. To express the duality and inner conflict still further there were chopped-in-two high gabardine trenches, trenches with mismatched fronts and backs, and cuffs and pant hems that were sliced and diced as emergency loosenings. The near-the-end scarlet nods to military tailoring, the expression of another painful traditionally masculine duty, layered on the tension just a soupçon more.So those quotes? Afterwards, Burton said: “I feel McQueen is always about a narrative, it’s about a beauty, an elegance, a rawness: a dark and a light. It’s not about street. So we don’t have a trainer [Editor’s note: English-English for sneaker]—okay, we do have a trainer, but it’s not in the show, so that’s a lie—but I really wanted to say it is about cut and silhouette and about clothes that are forever.” This was a beautiful, painful, true collection—with backbone. What a piece of work.
22 June 2018
It’s the unique combination of strength and delicacy that makes Sarah Burton’s work stand out—and the almost bewildering level of workmanship she applies to everything that passes through her hands. You’d think a pre-collection might be a place for coasting, or watering down between runway shows. It often is, but not at Alexander McQueen. If anything, this lookbook focuses the eye even more on the qualities she conjures. Between the precision-tailored pantsuits and the guipure lace, the militaria and the fragility, the strictness and the sensuous textures, it’s a visual feast.There’s a theme running through this one, drawn from nature—which is always her source in one way or another. This time, it’s seen through the lens of the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements—tendrilly, curlicued schemes, rich tapestries, prints inspired by the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Among this lineup, she’s nailed trouser suits for day—cropped kick-flares, double-breasted pinstripes—and three stunning black tuxedos. The third variation, merged with boned corsetry in front and a taffeta bustle embroidered with jet in back, deserves lingering over in its close-up. It goes without saying that the McQueen evening dresses, with their streaks of metallic sequins and elaborate embroideries on chiffon, are up there in the category of magical couture-work, but it’s the balance and the breadth of customers that this collection will seduce that makes it more impressive the more you look.
10 May 2018
Among the catwalks and the commentariat, what we’ve been talking about is how to represent women. Femaleness is a spectrum, not a grab bag for definitive pronouncements about power or romanticism. Yet it’s simple: Fashion should aid and abet us in all our various disguises, battles, triumphs, and—we hope—pleasures. It’s there to help mark our individuality. Why else buy?Sarah Burton’s is a subtle woman’s voice speaking through these complexities. Shoot from one end of her collection—an impeccable female tuxedo—to the gowns at the finish, and you will see someone working through our climate of change. Her empathy and stunning couture-level skills went into a collection she described as being about “extreme nature. Metamorphosis. A soft armor for women.”Burton’s affinity for the natural world is well known—it’s something she shared with Alexander McQueen. Her starting point was thinking about “butterflies and bugs, and paradise found rather than lost.” So we picked up on some symbolic imagery: Tailcoats and leather bodices that seemed caught in the process of peeling away, like cocoons. Butterfly wing patterns on dresses and fil coupe coats. Silk fringing. Exotic insect embroideries. A finale where pink duchesse satin butterfly wings and a grand, luscious red bow burst forth from a pair of tailored evening jackets.Burton has always been loyal to the memory of her late boss and friend. She’s carrying on his tailoring heritage with success. Pantsuits are selling, she said. For Fall, their origins could be traced back to the uniforms of the British Royal Horse Guards, with square-cut military horse blankets forming wraps. There were calf-length, high-heeled riding boots to match.But there was more than this narrative thread going on. Over time, Burton has been listening and adapting McQueen shows to make them more relatable. Her inclusive casting this season had models of color and various ages—her new normal for the brand. In a way, you could say the metamorphosis is that of Burton as a designer, breaking out of the conceptual restrictions of McQueen and saying things as she sees them. That widens the world of Alexander McQueen to far more women—trainer wearers, even—than ever before.
5 March 2018
Some designers talk inspiration: “So I was thinking about Bauhaus . . .” Some designers talk holidays: “So I was in St. Barth’s with my dogs, fresh off the jet—the turbulence was terrifying and the layover in Reykjavík appalling—and I thought about being a modern nomad . . .” And then there are the designers who truly talk clothes. That’s the hardest conversation to have—the real conversation—because drilling down into how the product articulates the brand often exposes the weakness of the hype that putatively connects them.Sarah Burton is so cherishable in this funny and often fake fashion world because she is so very truly saturated in the lore of her house. Plus, she isn’t too pretentious or fearful just to talk product, which is where the strength of her bond to the McQueen codes shines through most purely. The simple concept of this Fall show was, she said, an “exploration of British masculinity: so we definitely chose the right season!” That was a dig at how rubbishly British men attire themselves as soon as the sun comes out—they strip off immediately to expose a belief that “gym” is best served with tonic.This cruel (but true) aside was excusable via a collection that started with tailoring (of which McQueen anomalously sells a lot), blessedly stripped of the high and sci-fi house shoulder in favor of an “exploded” silhouette pushed out a few centimeters to either side. With an accompanying cinched waist, Burton’s top half looked sleek. Below it, often, was a track pant in luxury fabrics with side stripes that three years ago would have been laughable but today seemed far more reasonable a way to Southern a silhouette than the kicked high pants (to best show off beefily soled boots) that were the house alternative. We drifted through chalk stripe and windowpane iterations of the silhouette.There was a lot of doubleness afoot in this collection. An awesome shearling looked like two thanks to the inbuilt but extruding underlayer. As did an unignorable scarlet woolen parka, a black-leather-over-russet-leather almost-Harrington, and a chaotically ripped and restored military coat in a whole battle-plan of quilted and olive martial materials.This viewer was really into the tuxedo–track pant collision of the side-striped luxury jersey underpinnings beneath the black-on-black paisley-embroidered evening jackets, as well as the irregularly stitched top coats with contra-color paisley pattern. The eaten-away red-check mohair pieces were delectable too.
But the best of it was Burton herself: a designer who designs and isn’t afraid to just talk about that (minor asides against British masculine summer style apart). It would be fascinating to discover whether she has her own codes to pass on as powerfully as she communicates those of McQueen.
19 January 2018
In the upside-down world of fashion, Pre-Spring comes to our attention only wellafterthe Spring collections have been shown—or at least it does in the case of Alexander McQueen. Reason being: The house is releasing these pictures today, because “Pre” is being delivered to stores right now, in time for the holidays. Let not these labyrinthine explanations get in the way—is there anyone who is not confused by who’s showing what, where, and when? We’ll concentrate instead on appreciating the visually obvious: that Sarah Burton and her team had already started working on the English-eccentric country house and garden theme that made her Spring collection such a hit. The pretty firstfruits are here.In Britain, you see, it is quite usual to go out to tend the borders in your ball gown, gardening gloves, and an old mackintosh, never mind the weather! Well, obviously, it isn’t exactly normal, but the history and behavior of old English families, with their attics full of heirlooms, forgotten bedrooms left to molder for centuries, and rambling estates has captivated Burton. It has something to do with visiting Chatsworth, the grandest of them all, where the “House Style” exhibition showcasing the contents of the aristocratic Devonshire family’s wardrobes has just ended.Hence, the makings (and faux unmakings) of these clothes. Tattered country-lady tweeds, traditional silk head scarves, corsets, girdles, crinoline petticoats, as well as adaptations of gentlemanly Savile Row suits and argyle sweaters, formed the framework of a plot in which Burton imagined young girls putting themselves together from the contents of trunks and closets that hadn’t been opened for a generation or two. Chintzy wallpaper prints and ancient, priceless floral tapestries from the house and seed-packet designs, dried flowers, and heavy-duty rubber gardening gloves from the conservatory got involved in the fabrics and embroideries. Prettiest of all: the rose-garden pinks and, especially ’50s-influenced flower-printed chiffon frocks that presage what is to come, later in the spring season.
9 November 2017
The one advantage of 2017’s incredibly rainy British summer is that it was good for the gardens—and for Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen collection. When she and her band of textile specialists took a day trip out of London to visit Great Dixter house in East Sussex, its flower borders were in spectacular bloom. The photographs of what they saw filled walls in the studio and set Burton off. “It was about Britishness, being in the garden, and the healing power of nature,” she said.Transplanted to Paris, the McQueen narrative had grown. There were pergolas with canopies draped with embroidered flowers and a brick runway. The models, with their drenched-in-a-downpour hair, advanced along the garden path in studded flat boots, a crowd inspired both by the flowerbeds and the history of an English country house. Famously, British aristocrats will wear their country clothes till they fall apart and store away ball gowns, wedding dresses, bed linens, and other textiles in trunks for generations. The “House Style” exhibition at Chatsworth House had also fertilized this collection.The beautiful results began with deconstructed, falling-apart raincoats over pink chiffon ruffled dresses. Quilts, eiderdowns, and wallpaper prints inspired patchwork coats. Gardener’s waxed-cotton Barbours became khaki dresses and outdoor pants. Tailoring picked up English gentleman’s black-and-white checks and military tattersall. Decaying wedding dresses were brought down from notional attics and their remains worn over black trousers.It was all in the imaginative seam Burton has sewn since she succeeded the house founder. She’s a nature lover at heart whose team is capable of cultivating the most incredible handcrafted textiles. This season, some of the newest harked back to the ’50s in glassy synthetic, organza dance dresses in poppy and peony hues. It ended with eveningwear that will undoubtedly costume weddings held in grand country estates all over the world next summer.
2 October 2017
Yes, this was perhaps the most un-Spring/Summer Spring/Summer collection ever seen on the Spring/Summer runways. Even the shirts were leather. There were quilted jackets, heavy trenches, a wonderfully soft but totally leather red suit. Hot, hot, hot! Only a gorgeous scalloped pant and white cotton shirt perforated with broderie anglaise near the middle and a tank top near the start was proper phew-weather wear.That, though, is pedantry in the face of art. For what is dank sweat to ethereal concept? Tonight Sarah Burton gave us an interestingly inverted play onHeart of Darknessthat saw her menswear overlap with her women’s and climax with one of the most truly beautiful pieces seen this season.As completists might recall, Burton’s last womenswear collection was a pagan-touched journey (with fabulous, badass studded boots) into the North. She had visited Iceland and let the endless days, beautiful heritage, and pagan non-specificity of the nightless volcano-hewn realm’s territory inflect her. Tonight she connected that womenswear collection with menswear in a way not often seen at McQueen.We started firmly in the hitherto well-mapped lands of McQueen for men: beautifully cut topcoats and suits, black, their shoulders just a little softer than usual; a skintight bibbed shirt over cavalry flash pants; a Guardsman’s scarlet long leather coat. Only the whistles worn around the models’ necks hinted at the distress about to be unleashed upon these comfortable (if you fit) McQueen givens.The unraveling began with a series of hyper-fractured leather bikers and pants heaped with a panic-attack of zippers or faced with inverted shearling in panic-alarm red. Mixed up tailoring and trenches added to the disorientation. Slowly, menswear caught up with womenswear. That broderie anglaise look was the turning point, the curve in the river after which the destination was closer than the starting point. Check pants roughly belted with climbing cord were worn below a patched jumper based on a Fair Isle sock pattern Burton had encountered in Iceland. More Icelandic-pattern knit punctuated by a pagan pajama suit with some premodern compass points followed. Bearings were shifting.A moment of clarity—or at least return—followed with the padded jackets: conventional explorerwear issued in London. But then a white leather cape inlaid with blue contour lines and poetry from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Explorer” followed and set those certainties adrift.
It was inlaid with long strands of scarlet yarn, the same strafes we had seen in Burton’s dreamy previous womenswear collection in the same venue. Her sirens of the north were influencing her men from the south.Denim overalls and separates treated similarly to the cape followed. Then a jacket and topcoat of inverted floral tufts. And then the really, really fabulous pieces: two topcoats—one multicolored, one black—plus one ivory jacket, all of whose bodies were made of hanging scallops of silken fringe. Burton explained backstage that the multicolored piece was made of the carpet that her womenswear models had walked on back in March. It was inside out, to show the bare bones of its weave. In ivory, and especially black, these couture-level garments were mordantly moody.The end of the show climaxed, just as her womenswear show had, with the tree of life embroidered in crystal onto a jacket and topcoat with more fringing. This was a trip to Kipling’s never-country—and, for those with the ears to hear it, it whispered, “Come-hither. You may be some time.”
25 June 2017
Under incessant assault from the mayhem of tweet-reactive politics, the collective unconscious of fashion is beginning to register the instinct to turn back to things that are true and certain, to the land, to wanting to feel the ground beneath our feet. In Trump’s America, there are a rising number of references to pioneers and prairies—as just evidenced in Dior’s Resort show. Across the water in the agonized, divided land of Brexit, it means turning toward the ancient countryside to unearth the spiritual heritage embedded in the landscape. That’s what might be read into Sarah Burton’s recent travels with team Alexander McQueen to the far-flung extremities of Britain. They went to the Shetland Isles in Scotland one season and to the county of Cornwall in the far southwest of England in another. Her Pre-Fall collection, like her Fall show, is rooted in her findings there.Cornwall’s moors, legends, and the landscape-inspired work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth were the embedded narratives here. The sinuous shapes; wavy sheer/opaque knitted dresses; light-dark contrasts of rippling hemlines; and curved, carved-out heels recall Hepworth’s obsessions—which can be seen in the art displayed in her studio and her garden in St. Ives. The pagan thread of Arthurian legend—armor, courtly symbols of flowers and plants—is bound up in the medievalist atmosphere of tough black leather; gauntlets; flat, pointy boots; and romantic Arts and Crafts dresses.This is still very much McQueen heartland. Lee McQueen often began his collections by delving into the multiple layers of British history, with Burton acting as his right-hand researcher. It is territory she loves. With this offering, she also respected McQueen’s tailoring, itself now a legendary part of British fashion heritage. In dark times, when region has been set against region by the politics of those who voted to leave Europe and those who wished to stay, there’s something in this collection that seems to look beyond present strife toward the shared past that binds a people together.
15 May 2017
It was young people who raised the curtains on Sarah Burton’s fall show forAlexander McQueen. In an almost ceremonial moment, perhaps not quite registered by the crowd, she asked the black-clad junior members of her teams, and students from local schools in Paris, to hoist the woven hangings alongside the runway. Their taking part, however unnoticed, had a resonance which ran through a powerfully evocative show; her first which brought a down-to-earth sense of young womanhood to the magic of McQueen.Sarah Burton has always had an affinity for nature, and for tuning into history. Whilst she worked for Alexander Lee McQueen—he took her on as his first and only assistant when she was a Central Saint Martins textiles student—she grew into his trusted researcher and a fanatical archivist of all his work. As soon as she stepped up to replace him, her own interest in celebrating the mysterious powers of nature has been behind much of her work. Her creative breakthrough has come now she has decided to get out in the open air of landscapes and communities in far-flung corners of Britain. “I felt this sense of groundedness, of needing to feel the land, and tradition,” she said.This season, she took her team to Cornwall, the southernmost county of the United Kingdom. It’s a landscape which inspired the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and has ancient stone circles, medieval churches and—if you look hard enough—a surviving subculture of paganism and healing witchcraft.Discovering a Cloutie tree, on which people tie rags and ribbons as wishes and mementoes, triggered the beginning of the collection. Back in London, where Burton works in seclusion with the couture-level team which made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, imagination took flight. Evolving ideas with the incredible hand-embroidery and textiles teams, they wove ideas from the memento ribbons into tweeds, and thought about self-determining women, women who sewed messages into samplers centuries ago.The result was a show which staggered the audience with its dense imagery—dresses beaded with silvery trees; white lace figured with kissing doves, medieval tapestries of flora and fauna, trailing threads, witchy symbols of stars and suns traced in jet. Still, the thing which really made it was the believable youthfulness: long, tendrilly “undone” hair by Guido Palau, and flat studded bootees or McQueen trainers.Sarah Burton was wearing a pair when she ran out to give her bow, a pincushion still tied to her wrist.
She is a hands-on worker. For the first time, she had fully articulated her own vision, whilst fully honoring McQueen’s. She dealt out terrific black gray pantsuits, with long, belted coats and jackets; some in leather, and some with asymetric folds flying elegantly off to one side—shapes McQueen started, but with none of his armour-clad rigidity. Touchingly, she had her team painstakingly stitch his name and date of birth into the decoration of a dress, in a centuries-old style. It was inclusive: of the British past, of female power, and of the energy of youth. Excellent.
6 March 2017
An effortlessly gifted, peerless aesthete cursed by questionable organizational skills, a willful nature, and an extremely ill-advised lawsuit, Oscar Wilde died impoverished in a Paris hotel room at age 46. For thisAlexander McQueencollection, Wilde’s decline from controversial toast of London’s literati as the author ofSalome,The Importance of Being Earnest, andThe Picture of Dorian Graythrough to final decline proved an accommodating theme.McQueen’s pagoda shoulder was reduced over slim long jackets and narrow or kicky pants in serge and jacquard, and double-breasted overcoats given texture by golden “bullion” embroidery (peacock feathers mostly, the recurring motif of the collection) and stone-studded silver jewelry. Afghan-esque shearlings in three lengths, guardsman’s red capes and coats with gold buttons, distressed knits, and a fuzzily embraceable dressing gown coat were all typically extravagant. Elbow-patched tailoring with tied waistcoats in punchy tattersall were as dressed down as this determinedly exhibitionist offering got, but still powerfully punchy. So, too, were bordeaux, blue, and yellow frock coats over skinny military flashed pants in velvet (historicized Teddy Boy wear) and a hand-frogged, shawl-collared smoking jacket gridded with paisley teardrops. Two pieces at the end, a golden peacock-embroidered evening cape and a voluminous carpet-texture jacquard topcoat, were especially easy to imagine Wilde swooping sensually about in. One of Wilde’s most famous bon mots was that, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Were he alive to see this collection, he doubtless would have added an exception to his excellent rule.
16 January 2017
Sarah Burtonflew her team up to the Shetland Isles, far north of mainland Scotland, to gather their research last summer. They walked the dramatic landscapes, photographed wild flowers, watched birds wheeling in the skies, and surf crashing in on deserted beaches. They researched the living traditions carried out by the crofters, a tiny community which has knitted wool lace shawls for hundreds of years. Then they came back to the McQueen studio in gritty, urban London, inspired to make a show from everything they’d seen.Very beautiful it was, and stunning in its long, sinuous dresses knitted from wool lace, clinging tight to a tiny, high bodice and flaring to handkerchief-point skirts. The McQueen manufacturing may be done in Italy, practically to haute-couture standards, but the prototypes are all made in the London studio. By some miracle of handwork, the traditional pattern of Fair Isle sweaters was banded into the lace at some point.Amongst all the sheer, leg-of-mutton-sleeved dresses, the embroideries of wild flowers, and blue thistle prints on cotton, there was the suiting. Checked black-and-white plaid pantsuits with punk-referenced kilts, and cropped kick flares were familiarly true to the McQueen heritage.In watching all this, questions might be raised over how practicable McQueen is for everydaywear. Somewhere in this, ranges will have to be organized to be wearable. That thought, however, was temporarily washed away by the finale dresses. Now in the realms of fantasy, Sarah Burton’s models looked like mermaids or sea-goddesses, risen from the deep in incredible dresses beaded with shipwrecks and fish. The finale dress had a white ruffled train which looked as if its model was walking through crashing, foaming surf. It was one of the indelible highlights of Spring 2017.
3 October 2016
What are these flowers, printed? “No, no,”Sarah Burtonhastened to explain as she held out the flounce on a tiny ruffled dance dress for closer inspection. “Each one is hand-painted, and you see, it’s on leather.” Such is the extraordinary sophistication of handwork that Burton puts into her collections that its wonders are only truly read close up. The mixtures of carnations, yellow roses, peonies, and poppies, each petal expertly defined with an artist’s paintbrush, were inspired, she said, by British folk art and domestic interiors: “Wallpaper, patterns you see on canal barges.”The leather these English vernacular florals were painted on is incredibly fine and soft, hardly leather-looking at all either. “We thought we’d treat leather in a different way, as if it were fabric,” Burton noted. The eye-tricking capabilities of the teams behindMcQueenare equally phenomenal when it comes to knitwear these days. Search as you might, you may not be able to spot the knits in this Resort collection, but that’s what the trio of white, black, and red dresses actually are. “The technology and machinery at our factory in Italy has advanced so much. What they can do now is so fine it looks like lace,” the designer explained.Clothes like these are a very far cry from humdrum commercial fare to fill the gaps in stores between seasons. With Burton’s softening touch, they transcend the source material to become very special, nondisposable items a woman might want to keep forever. The only question mark is over how incredible pieces like these can be best understood and appreciated. The reality of what they actually are can’t really be captured in static photography, and if they whip by at a distance on a runway, they’re difficult to see, too. Maybe McQueen should come up with some alternative ways of viewing these beautiful things.
23 June 2016
With creative directorSarah Burtonstill away on maternity leave after the birth of her third child, theAlexander McQueenlabel stepped back from the runway to present its latest menswear collection via a series of intimate appointments and a sequence of atmospheric images photographed by Julia Hetta. “You wouldn’t get them from a show,” said Harley Hughes, McQueen’s head of menswear design, of Hetta’s painterly images.You also wouldn’t get that level of interaction, with the designers nor with the clothes themselves. It made a pertinent argument for alternatives to catwalk showcases—one that felt timely, given the current fusing of men’s and women’s runway presentations from many of the brand’s contemporaries (FYI—McQueen reps say the label will be back showing for Fall 2017). And McQueen’s menswear bears closer scrutiny, as inspection often surrenders hidden details that the runway can swamp. In this collection, those details included the intentional curling edge of the gold embroideries embellishing sweaters and jackets, inspired by the notion of archive clothes crumpled and distressed with age, a revival of old wardrobe favorites.There was a sense of familiarity about this collection—for one thing, it continued in the same vein as McQueen’s Fall menswear offering, swinging from street to ceremony and offering sharp tailoring for day and plenty of exuberantly decorated eveningwear, teamed with white sneakers for a contemporary feel. Apparently, alongside the decorated pieces, McQueen’s kicks are the first thing to sell out when they hit stores. But it also referenced a rich seam of classic English tailoring, of braid-bedecked military suiting and frogged officer’s mess dress that is so important to the 21st-century survival of Savile Row, where a young Lee McQueen first learned his trade.Hughes elaborated on a story line: “A ’60s guy, in London, going off traveling and immersing himself in imperial India,” he said. So the suits were sharply cut, in crunchy paisley brocade with a hint of Mr. Fish, the choice psychedelic ’60s suit-maker, alongside flamboyant embroidered frock coats, ruffled shifts, and dandyish silk roll-necks based on vintage Turnbull & Asser styles. Both they and Mr. Fish—for all his peculiarity—were British through and through, much like McQueen itself. Indeed, despite the roaming of influence, the results come right back to London.
The Raj may have influenced a maharani’s ransom of paste jewels, for instance, but they wound up hung off variations on last season’s wince-worthy facial jewelry—clip-on, rather than actually piercing the cheeks of the models, but nevertheless distinctly punk in feel. Even when crushed velvets turned a rich turmeric, Hughes couldn’t help but remark they’d strayed into “Keith Richards territory.”Hetta’s handsome lookbook images themselves, meanwhile, express the sweltering, sun-bleached feel of an air-con-free Mumbai 50-odd years ago, shimmering with a mirage-like haze. It was, ironically, shot around the corner from the McQueen HQ in a glass box in London’s Clerkenwell, taking advantage of the city’s unseasonably clement June weather to stand in for the subcontinent. You’d never get that in a runway show, indeed.
13 June 2016
Sarah Burtonis about to have her third baby in two weeks’ time, but before going off on maternity leave tonight, she delivered the most beautiful, sensitive, and breathtakingly craftedAlexander McQueencollection, at home in London. Almost literally, it was spun out of dreams.What she started in her hugely well-received pre-collection—research that took her toSchiaparelli-like surrealist prints and cobweb-fine knits—came into full poetic bloom here, at a level every bit as elevated as haute couture. She described her woman as: “Almost sleepwalking, in a state where reality and dreams become blurred.” Toward the end, this imagined character had become an almost incorporeal sylph, like a vision from an Erté drawing, trailing a silver-sprinkled cloak embroidered with stardust and the phases of the moon.But the collection had substance too. It started with black coats, variously jacquarded with pocket watches, eyes, and butterflies, or sculpted from fine leather and then hand-painted with flowers by a specialist floral artist. Tailoring was always one of McQueen’s power bases, and the mannish Savile Row exactitude of the double-lapel suits honored that fully but in a modern, feminine, unconstricting way.As the sequence went on, the clothes began their progress into the bedroom: There were lacy bras and sleeves cut to fall off shoulders. Then came the knit dresses, which cascaded in gossamer layers as delicate as lace. And finally, we were in the place of dreams. The bodices of black tulle dresses were set with jeweled stars, each one a masterpiece. And so to bed, wrapped in satin duvet jackets, and a final superb shell-pink eiderdown coat, lined with marabou. “That one started life as an antique piece we found on Portobello market,” Burton laughed.The tenderness and the technical expertise she mustered for this collection was a triumph, taking hundreds of hours of skilled labor by dozens of specialists in London and Italy. Burton can now go off and sleep easy in the knowledge that her own vision for McQueen is fully realized and applauded to the skies. The more she has relaxed into the confidence of her feminine instincts, the better she’s become. It was fitting that the venue she chose was the same one in which she assisted Lee McQueen at a show 20 years ago. In a way, it was a homecoming—and, really, why shouldn’t it stay that way? This is the place Alexander McQueen belongs.
It would be a dream come true for London if this show continued to cast its spell in the city of its origin.
21 February 2016
There’s a sensuous glamour emerging through Pre-Fall which seems to be hovering somewhere around the ’30s or ’40s. Sarah Burton has pinned it to a theme she called “thinking about a woman’s obsession with the possessions she treasures, like her jewelry and makeup, and the things she collects.” This Pre-Fall character is a properly elegant woman, with red lipstick and a penchant for feather chubbies and velvet ankle-strap platforms, who might reach into her extensive wardrobe and choose between any number of fragile, dramatic gowns for an evening out. Maybe she was actually on the stage once, or in the movies—that would account for her ownership of that incredible Deco gold-sequinned dress with sheer black chiffon ruffles as sleeves. Marlene Dietrich herself wouldn’t have said no to that.Well, it’s a delight when fashion can make you fantasize for a moment. Yet the fact is that Sarah Burton has steered this collection gently away from too much stylization. “It's quite feminine, and unconstructed,” is the way she puts it. The patterns of lipsticks, Fabergé eggs, butterflies, birds, and the McQueen skull motif appear as prints on silk dresses and on coats, as well as on the show-stopping embroidered sheer gowns. Just as appealing, for daywear, is the two-piece matching red paisley skirt and scarf-print blouse with a gathered neckline, shown with long red suede gloves and matching jeweled cuffs. Okay: That could come over as a pulled-together look for professional purposes without the accessories—but just in case you wanted to play Diana Vreeland for a day, the full ensemble would be just the thing.
14 January 2016
The challenge facing Sarah Burton each menswear season is considerable, yet can be concisely summarized: How to work within theMcQueenconfines of tailoring, without winding up on the stuffy side of the fence? The label’s founder apprenticed at one of the starchiest and most traditional houses on “The Row,” Anderson & Sheppard, making suits for the Prince of Wales. But he used that tradition to buck the system—more visibly for women, granted, on whom an impeccably tailored menswear suit can look sharp and a little subversive, rather than staid.For Burton, some seasons are more successful than others. Like this Fall. The designer started off, she said, in the London museum devoted to Sir John Soane. That ignited an interest in collecting, specifically in Charles Darwin and his voyages to accumulate specimens. “Talismans,” Burton called them. “Collecting, traveling. Obsession.”Obsessionis a great word for McQueen clothes—and this collection was obsessed with McQueen talismans. The specimens Burton alighted on were butterflies and moths, examples of which were woven into the very fabric of her tailoring—jacquards laid out like a lepidopterist’s dream ensemble, or embroidered in swarms across coats and blazers.Moths are, of course, a McQueen talisman—live versions appeared in two of his shows, their likeness in numerous others. They were the most evident manifestation of a number of classic McQueen references here today, culled from collections for him and her alike. For Fall, Burton’s McQueen men had their own contemporary savage beauty, with their punkish, pierced faces, cheeks seemingly impaled on safety pins dribbling filigree chains. “I would never dare call it ‘street’,” Burton balked. “But I wanted it to feel relevant to now.” The collection did, even when it boldly trod on Lee McQueen’s toes, in frogged hussar’s jackets and red barathea wool scrolled with jet, couture, and Victoriana melding together. Those were atypical menswear, but typical McQueen. The menswear references were archetypal British tailoring—officers’ mess dress, voluminous greatcoats, tautly cut double-breasted suiting. The feminizing touches were subtle—ribbons of velvet hemming coats, or as tuxedo-stripes trailing past hemlines, embroideries of jet and diamanté, and all those butterflies. But they had impact.“I wanted to take the stuffing out of it,” said Burton.
She was referring to softer tailoring specifically—silk jackets and coats based on foliate oil paintings, for instance, or the chiffon overlay on wool. But she could have been talking about the collection in general, where wing-collared shirts were starchy but came without ties and trousers, slouched over down-heel sneakers.Burton could also have been talking about her kid-glove attitude toward Lee McQueen’s legacy—a legacy that has been seen by more than a million people, across two continents, in that “Savage Beauty” retrospective. That was womenswear-specific, but there has thus far been a hangover in her menswear shows, which have sometimes felt like museum pieces, staid and reverential; and other times like a museum’s gift shop, packed with crass looky-likey spin-offs designed purely to make money.Subtly deferential rather than overtly referential, covetable rather than commercial, this McQueen collection trod another path—namely, its own. That Burton is able to do this without abandoning the house’s hallmarks and legacy is a mark of her swelling confidence, evident—finally—for men and women alike. This was as strong as any show she’s presented in Paris. The McQueen moths summed the whole thing up: They originated in memento mori, Renaissance paintings packed with hidden meaning that act as reminders of our own mortality. There, moths and butterflies symbolize the soul. It’s appropriate that they proliferated here, because soul was something this McQueen collection had in spades.
10 January 2016
The girls had pink-cheeked complexions and tousled hair flowing down their backs—a bunch of young English roses who might have been caught by Julia Margaret Cameron’s camera lens in Victorian times. What they were dressed in were the prettiest and most personal designs that have come fromSarah Burtonsince she took over as creative director ofAlexander McQueen. Gone were the face-obscuring headdresses and ironclad corsets; gone the hobbling platform shoes. “I wanted it to be believable, touchable, soft,” said Burton backstage.To an extent, the beautiful dresses—with their ruffles cascading across the body and falling off shoulders, the palette of pale pink, the flower-strewn patterns, the pristine cotton, the tattered lace, and the frock-coated tailoring—speak for themselves. Everything about them in these times when every camera phone has a zoom lens can be examined in all their extraordinary detail, down to the finest knitted stitches, the flower-painted wooden clogs, and the couture-level embroidery. On the other hand, for all that the ethereal lightness, whip-smart tailoring, and elaborate designs communicated a new, relaxed, of-the-season relevance, they also carried the story of a London history that Burton wanted to make known.She explained that she’d been inspired by the 17th-century silk weavers of Spitalfields, members of the Huguenot Protestant faith who fled religious persecution in France and settled in London’s East End. “I loved the stories of how they arrived with very little, bringing seeds and bulbs in their pockets to grow. They were gardeners. And they wove their French flowers into the patterns on their silks.”Burton’s choice of reference point was personal—she is a country girl with a real love of nature—but the resonances run deeper than her attraction to pretty flowers. Alexander McQueen traced part of his family bloodline back to some of the estimated 50,000 Huguenot refugees who were welcomed into Britain by the edict of King Charles II and became producers of high fashion silks for court finery and the great homes of England. McQueen was proud of that link to the first immigrants to bring luxury fashion to London, and he would surely approve of his former protégée using this platform to point to the parallels with today’s migrant crisis.There was one silk dress, covered with sprigs of flowers, that came somewhere in the middle of the collection and was a near replica of a 17th-century court dress Burton examined.
How funny to imagine that this delightful, demure dress might have its own outing at the British court in the 21st century.Kate Middletonwould look wonderful in it.
4 October 2015
If Alexander McQueen's Fall collection had an elegantly dying autumn in mind for Sarah Burton, she was thinking of Resort as "romance, beauty, positivity, flowers blooming." Sweet pea, hollyhocks, violets, butterflies flying around a garden in springtime…all of that was stitched onto extraordinary tulle evening dresses, sheaths of fragility.The same idea was communicated in disheveled lace pieces, like something found in a trunk or an attic. The obvious reference was one of Lee McQueen's finest moments, the dance marathon collection from Spring 2004, which played into Burton's own feeling right now for "anti-fast fashion," something that is more permanent rather than seasonal. That's why there was what she called "a make-do and mend" mood. It was spectacularly realized in biker jackets patched with tweed, or the sleeves and body of an old Victorian jacket cut out of leather and cross-stitched like a sampler. That marriage of structured past and loosey-goosey present was quintessential McQueen.Burton was loving the notion of heirloom pieces, of making things precious by giving them heritage. So there was a dress studded with jewels that looked like old brooches, and a necklace that was made up of charms—memories collected. The knuckle-duster handles on clutch bags were reconfigured as antique rings, and belt buckles might have been sourced in vintage shops.And then there was that nipped-waist, flared-skirt, '40s silhouette that is classic McQueen, pleated here for maximum swing. The designer showed it with raffia brothel creepers, so the look was firmly grounded. But is thateverthe case with this house? Burton dreams, and we dream right along with her.
24 June 2015
The metaphors fell like rain in McQueen's Spring collection for men. Victorian sailors were the protagonists. Imagine them as men adrift, looking for somewhere to belong, seeking a sense of identity in the tattoos with which they covered themselves. All of that could apply to the collection itself.There was sharply defined elegance in the elongated captain's coats, but a soft, almost androgynous quality in pajamalike jacquards. Mended denim pieces and fraying jackets felt like well-worn relics of a long voyage. Sarah Burton scattered traditional nautical tattoo motifs—compasses, mermaids, anchors—across her spare tailoring, but storybook sea monsters were a stronger graphic element, in a terrycloth bathrobe no less. And there were suits patterned in dazzle ship camouflage, which looked almost incongruously dynamic in this context. That's because dynamism was precisely what the collection lacked. Burton's crew might have been drowned lost boys, suspended out of time, their sole connection to now their footwear. If Fall's earthbound collection packed a real punch, this one felt all at sea.
14 June 2015
In the same week that the Alexander McQueen exhibition opens at the V&A in London—a run that is already completely sold out—Sarah Burton did exactly what she had to do when she showed her latest collection for the label. She brought the romance back.Burton was in a postshow fret that she hadn't shown enough ready-to-wear, but all those options will be in the showroom. On the catwalk tonight she offered up the purest distillation of what she called "the spirit of the rose," a flower that begins with a tight bud that opens into a lush bloom and then eventually collapses back onto itself in gorgeous decay. Burton had in mind the photographs of David Sims, who once made a book for the art/fashion publicationVisionairethat was dedicated to the rise and fall of the rose. This show trod that same path, structure to dissolution, just like nature itself. The show notes said it better: "the frayed nature of reality and the beauty of imperfection."Imperfection can seldom have looked more beautiful than with models whose Guido-ed hair and Pat McGrath-ed makeup were the living Scissorhands-y embodiment of an Egon Schiele painting. Schiele's twisty, fraught intensity echoed throughout the collection, but that intensity at last felt like a fit with Burton. She has never known when to stop with her manic attention to detail. Here, it all worked in an appropriately weird way.Weird, as in the paper-thin leather that was bonded to a floral jacquard for a black trouser suit and a pink coat. Or the leather, not so paper-thin, that was intarsia-ed into crystal-pleated bustier dresses. Or the shredded patent that made glossy puddles on top of the silk coats at the beginning of the show. Or in the distressed lace gowns that closed the presentation in a shroud of silk threads, echoing the hair with which Lee McQueen once lined his jackets.Burton's show wasn't the first this season to present a melancholic Victorian mood. Maybe it was the mourning exhibition at the Met; maybe it's being fed by binge-watchingPenny Dreadfulor, for the more arcane among us,The Crimson Petal and the White. Whatever, a strange sense of loss seeps from fashion for Fall 2015. There are few designers more familiar with such a sensation than Sarah Burton. And it's perhaps her familiarity with the feeling that could inspire a dress as simply ravishing as the cloud of tiered chiffon ruffles that evoked a bloodred rose on the brink of blowsy-ness. Truly, the beauty of imperfection.
10 March 2015
Sarah Burton mentioned the 19th-century photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron and the 19th-century novelFar From the Madding Crowdas reference points for Alexander McQueen's Pre-Fall collection. So far, so historical, as reference points go, and therefore, so in keeping with the ethos that a lot of people would attach to the label. Lee McQueen's obsessive historicism brought a lot of beauty and romance to his work. But look again at the women in Cameron's photos, take on board the fact that it was Julie Christie in the film version ofMadding Crowdthat Burton was thinking about, and a slightly different picture emerged. "How do you make historic nods feel like you want to wear them now?" That was the question the designer was asking—and, more specifically, how to make thingsshewanted herself.It helped that she was working on her men's and Pre-Fall collections at the same time. Burton loves the frock-coat silhouette—it gave Pre-Fall its flair. The acute tailoring sliced with floral detailing was also a lift from menswear. If the whitework harked back to the 19th century, it was paired with exploded piqués and cut into pretty skating dresses. Wear such a dress with the chunky loafers that were one of the shoe styles on offer and you'd omit the prettiness and up the attitude. Same with all the leather that Burton showed. She draped and ruffled it, even when she used it for a biker, then slung a wide belt around it to create a hyper-waisted silhouette that felt like a contemporary take on the dressy '30s tailoring McQueen himself loved. It looked irresistible in a ruffled skirt in suede topped by a felted cashmere military jacket with epaulets.
20 January 2015
The centenary of World War I has been inescapable in the U.K. over the past 12 months, its most extraordinary manifestation being the red tide of hundreds of thousands of ceramic poppies that spilled into the moat of the Tower of London. It would have been a surprise if no one in fashion acknowledged such a galvanizing moment in pop culture. Equally, it made sense that it would be Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen who transmogrified history into a fashion statement.Her platform was uniforms. There was the obvious military association in army green and air force blue, epaulets and army pockets, and the diamanté medals that decorated the show's finale. The words "truth," "valour," and "honour" were emphatically bold on jackets and coats. But there were also businessman's pinstripes and houndstooth (albeit exploded into abstraction), and the notion of a uniform of any kind as a great leveler, something to give men a sense of belonging with its democratic breaking down of social codes. At the same time, Burton referenced Regency England, the turning point in sartorial history when army uniforms were adapted by the visionary dandy Beau Brummell and his tailors to create an outfit suitable for everyday life. In Burton's hands, this significant moment was translated into a military blouson lifted and flared in the back to create tails, like a Regency frock coat.The poppies that are worn for Remembrance Day in Britain were rendered in silk jacquards for suits and coats. Burton also used the English rose as a floral motif in a crisscross that looked like a bandolier, or a Scottish cross. The rose was woven into a tabard—or protective breastplate—which acted as the third element in a three-piece suit.Burton's silhouette was built on thick-soled creepers and cropped Steerpike pants, teddy boy-like, a reminder of the gangs, the urban tribes that men belong to outside the military. It was another dip into the past, and yet for all of that this was a McQueen collection that didn't feel weighed down by history. Yes, there was an element of romantic melancholy (where would McQueen be without that?), but there was also a peculiar timeliness for a world with war on its mind. And that energized the showandthe collection.
11 January 2015
Marc Quinn's huge, ethereal white orchids, gorgeously spotlighted in the center of the black oak catwalk, were in fact cast in bronze. The contrast of floral delicacy and weighty substance was a perfect introduction to Sarah Burton's new collection for Alexander McQueen. She's been in a Japanese frame of mind for at least her last men's and Resort collections. Here, the geisha and the samurai embodied the extremes of her latest looks.Burton fell under Japan's spell years ago, when she'd traveled there on Lee's business. She acquired quite the collection of kimonos and other artisanal artifacts. And she fell in love with the notion that clothes could have so much personal meaning for their owners. That idea of preciousness was her new inspiration. "Make your clothes so they mean something," was her mantra.It made for an intense show. The models walked with faces encircled in black lacquer frames, courtesy of the ingenious makeup-ist Pat McGrath. The clothes were tightly belted, tightly harnessed, which created an especially loaded image when the harness was wrapped around a purely feminine kimono shape: the ultimate lady warrior. The fetishistic physicality of such a look was echoed in the inserts that articulated jacquard sheaths, the streamlined pantsuits and the flaring skater skirts, the zippered kimono sleeves. The clothes were infused with an odd energy.There was the standard maniacal attention to detail in the pearls that seeded the flowers on a skirt of ruffled chiffon, but it would be pleasing to think that this collection represented a new directness for Burton. At least the history here was personal—or as personal as that grab bag of her souvenirs from her Japanese trips. And the face-off between geisha and samurai would seem like the very embodiment of the savage beauty that nestles at the dark heart of McQueen.
30 September 2014
The most intriguing element in the Alexander McQueen Resort collection was the gleeful spirit of vandalism that spritzed a huge red cross across a tidy little jacquard coat. Letting go is something you crave from McQueen, and here was one signal instance of Sarah Burton doing that. Like so many of her London peers this season, she wove her Resortwear and her menswear together: The red, white, and black Kabuki-ness of the men's collection she showed in London came round again. So did the collage of classic patterns, like houndstooth and Prince of Wales check cut in a wide-legged pantsuit. And there was a definite Japanese undertow in the floral cutouts, like antique screens. Or maybe like Matisse.Yep, Burton had been as enthralled by the exhibition of Matisse cutouts at the Tate Modern as the rest of London. She captured a flavor of the show in her own cutout flowers. They were embroidered on houndstooth, carved into napa leather, or laser cut from silk and laid across the body in the kind of dauntingly precise symmetry that defines McQueen.Precision is the ultimate weapon in Burton's arsenal. A mackintosh-cum-dress in navy vinyl bonded in white leather might be one of the single most intimidating outfits of the Resort season. But give it a moment and the unholy rampant sensuality of such an item made an unforgettable connection. After all, the only thing you canreallydo in that look is let go.
23 June 2014
Sarah Burton gave herself a very clear mandate with Alexander McQueen menswear this season: No history. After Fall's "nostalgic look back," she fancied a clean slate. But, this being McQueen, any old palate cleanser wouldn't do. Burton was drawn to the flat white blankness of the Kabuki mask, with its bold counterpoints of black and red. These she abstracted into swirls of color across coats, jackets, and trousers.In another break with the past, there was no symmetry in the patterns she created. But there was still the immaculate order of McQueen's workmanship, from the complex cutting that created illusions of layering to the torrent of black bugle beads that flowed off a jacket and across a T-shirt in a trompe l'oeil coil.It's actually all that craft that can't help but connect McQueen with the weight of tradition that Burton herself might occasionally wish to escape. Meaning that, even if she intended a history-free collection, there was a lot about thelookof these clothes that evoked something fantastical. That might just be the price of obsession. Yes, a boldly patterned shirt and baggy shorts had a kind of hip-hop brashness, but the default position of McQueen menswear is an elongated, aristocratic elegance, exemplified here by long coats belted high across the chest. There may simply be no escape from the past.
15 June 2014
Lee McQueen often claimed that he felt obliged to offer his audience, drained by weeks of shows, something spectacular to reanimate them. The thought drifted across the minds of some of the more seasoned guests tonight when they walked into an arcane venue—the training stables of the Garde Républicaine—to be confronted by a landscape composed of ten thousand heather plants, illuminated by spooky moonlight. The mind raced."Wild beauty" was Sarah Burton's inspiration. She insisted she was over construction, corseting, control. "I wanted to see the woman's face again," she said. "Free her a bit, touch her, feel her." So her Fall Alexander McQueen collection was built on a swingy trapeze shape, a childlike proportion. "It's the world through an innocent child's eyes," said Burton, whose ongoing experience of recent motherhood might have assisted the collection in ways she didn't fully understand. Take the fairy-tale aspect, for instance—the ethereal, magical quality of delicately embroidered organzas, or coats exhaustively composed from hand-cut feathers to create the illusion of moth's wings, or virginal smocks in broderie anglaise. But in fairy tales, innocence is always in tandem with a wolf, a witch, or some other entity of darkness, and that also came across clearly in Burton's collection. There was something feral in what she showed. One model was owl-like in a swooping fur cape. Another was swathed in skunk, with fiercely feathered eyes.The artisanal aptitude of the McQueen atelier was so much in evidence in the extraordinary detailing of the collection that the clothes straddled a fine line between ready-to-wear and couture. This may be the most logical option for Burton going forward. She is so entranced by time-consuming technique that it's hard to envisage a time when mass production carries the McQueen ethos to the masses. Which is a shame, because every home should have one.
3 March 2014
There was something almost occult about Sarah Burton's pre-fall collection for Alexander McQueen—an intense, dark, hermetic something that made the clothes impenetrable. But when Burton mentioned Egon Schiele as a reference, the looks made more sense. Schiele twisted the sinuous forms of art nouveau into heady, erotic, morbid images. The new McQueen collection had some of that peculiar flavor.The silhouette was high-waisted, ankle-length. Crushed frills and ruffles added a funereal Victorian edge. Another key detail: basting stitches, emphasizing the construction of tailored pieces. The fabrics were boiled cashmere and heavy washed satin and silk. The decoration was embroidered flowers, silver poppies and tulips jacquard-ed by hand, so weighty they felt like the decadent essence of Baudelaire'sfleurs du mal. There was no light in the collection at all. The accessories compounded the mood. All of them had the sinister flair of threat, not promise: necklaces like heavy silver dog chains, foxtails dangling off those same chains, belts that were straightened silver coat hangers, boots that were glam bovver, a harness of silver bugle beads attached to a collar of garnet red beaded roses. The pretties sporting such items could have been the consorts of Bill the Butcher, the psychotic crime lord from Scorsese'sGangs of New York(and an archetype that McQueen himself drew on in one of his last men's collections).But there was also a wealth of ideas in Burton's work, and extreme though they may have been in the fifteen looks that were presented as pre-fall's essence, they translated with surprising success into an accessible commercial collection, with just the right spice of heady, erotic, morbid allure.
16 January 2014
Deconsecrated churches always made memorable venues for Alexander McQueen shows, so the choice of Welsh Chapel to host the label's latest menswear offering already felt like a trip down memory lane, even before the clothes emerged with a tailored, kilted flair that had distinct echoes of Lee McQueen's own men's collections from ages past. Indeed, Sarah Burton was talking about "a nostalgic look back," not just at McQueen's history but also at the history of the chapel and the Soho neighborhood that surrounds it.Welsh Chapel spent the eighties as the London outpost of New York's legendary, badly behaved Limelight nightclub. This afternoon, it had the spectral, hushed air of a place that has slipped back into shadow, almost forgotten, after absorbing more than a century of human energy, good and bad. Once the ominous throb of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" kicked in, it was clear that this particular reawakening would be about the darkness.The monochrome starkness of the clothing was a deliberate effort by Burton to "cleanse the palette." She was inspired by the work of John Deakin, who photographed the Soho art scene in the fifties. Why? "Honesty, beauty, melancholy," she said. Deakin's image of a young Lucian Freud was printed on a trenchcoat. It was a simple, striking effect, in keeping with the spirit of a collection that had been shorn of embellishment, other than the dull gleam of gold lamé in the evening looks and the rivulets of zips that ran down coats and kilts. One coat also featured the embroidered scribble of a war poem by Oliver Bernard, another Deakin subject.The models wore crow feathers in their hair, and with the kilts, the boots, and the military precision of the elongated double-breasted tailoring, it wasn't hard to see them as warriors of the urban wasteland. This is turf that McQueen has well and truly mined before, so perhaps it was the familiarity that made what was once fierce now feel almost like an exhibit in a mythical McQueen museum. Still, a punk three-piece (jacket, kilt, and pants) in pink tartan never loses its allure.
6 January 2014
"I didn't want it to feel too referenced to a period or a theme," Sarah Burton said about the magical collection she showed for Alexander McQueen tonight. True, there was nothing so specific as to anchor the clothes we saw to any one time or place, but the associations flew thick and fast: the golden helmets, harnesses, and armlets of Amazons; ostrich-feathered Zulus; the intricate beaded outfits of tribal priestesses; the kilt-over-trouser combo of the Celtic warrior; the graphic geometries of Mondrian, or Picasso in his African period.…Lee McQueen always insisted thatNational Geographicwas his first port of call, and that magazine's ethnic grab bag pulsated in Burton's collection, in graphic checkerboard beading, in flurries of ostrich feathers, in crocodile breastplates. It added up to a primal image of strength and empowerment. Burton's twins are eight months old now, and she's ready to get back in the game; there was an overwhelming sense of reconnection in her collection. "Saying something new, saying something personal," was the way she put it. Much of that jelled with things we've been hearing elsewhere. The harness tops and leggings under flaring skirts were timely. Even more so was the notion of female tribalism that has reverberated throughout the season. What differentiated the McQueen take on these ideas was the mind-boggling craftsmanship. Checks? Such a simple little word, until those checks were configured in beads and feathers hand-worked with minute precision.It was always in the evening looks where a McQueen collection would swing into a fetishistic overdrive of technique. Here? "I didn't want to do 'big' gowns," said Burton. "I wanted energy without froth." So there was a dress that looked like a beautiful lattice of recycled plastic, and another with rings of red feathers reaching skyward, simultaneously a Capucci couture quote and an evocation of tribal dancers. The show notes referenced "found objects," which made it easy to imagine these clothes becoming the subject of cargo cults in the distant future, some tribe-to-come wondering why—and, maybe more important, how.
30 September 2013
The most striking image of Alexander McQueen's Fall collection was the gilded, caged face. You could read a book into that, just like you could interpret McQueen's Resort collection as a release for Sarah Burton. There was something so free and organic about the clothing and accessories that it was almost as though Burton had become a lady of the canyon…Laurel Canyon, that is. Early on in the genesis of the collection, Corinne Day's photos of Kate Moss in an American Indian headdress had caught someone's eye. Carefree, vibrant youth—that was the spirit Burton sought. The fact that she managed to wire it to a classic McQueen trope like Travis Banton's hyper-waisted 1930s silhouette was a pretty accurate gauge of how effectively she has twisted the signatures she inherited.It was actually thefortiesthat snared Burton's imagination, particularly the clothes that working women wore while their men were at war. Collections often start somewhere like that and then career off somewhere else, and this one was no exception. Still, the little dresses in a canvas cotton with their dungaree straps and unfinished seams had a sturdy Rosie the Riveter feel. Even so, under the canvas skirt were seven layers of broderie anglaise petticoats. This will always be the strange, effortful world of McQueen, where denims are patchworked together from 11 different washes and every single crocheted, brocaded, floral-ed, butterflied, broderie anglaise-ed scrap in a patchworked evening dress has been specially created. Meaning that, for Burton, release comes one look at a time.Oh well, never mind that, because the result let the sunshine in. When you say forties and functional, the American designer Claire McCardell springs to mind, and there were echoes: a drawstring neckline on an embossed peasant top, or a prettily bowed fichu neckline. But McCardell or no, therewasa real flavor of Americana in the collection. A nubuck calfskin dress—patchworked, embossed, whipstitched—felt like the product of an artisanal studio in the bowels of the Hollywood Hills. So did the tapestry-effect trousers and crocheted keyhole gown. The suede saddlebag styled as a clutch was the perfect accessory. If this was literally a new frontier for McQueen, it was—as all frontiers should be—full of promise.
21 June 2013
It's tantalizing to think that Lee McQueen identified with Robinson Crusoe. A lost soul stranded in nature, barbarism lurking in the shadows…it already sounds like the genesis of a McQueen collection. No wonder he returned to the idea of the castaway a few times in his career. With today's menswear show, Sarah Burton also tapped into the notion. In a castaway corner of industrial London—under the derelict railway arches of King's Cross—she staged another of her richly layered fashion dramas. Burton has shown herself a great lover of ceremony. "Male rites of passage" was today's keynote. The first looks transmuted the scalloped lace of a christening gown. The last, severely monochromatic, felt like clerics come to administer last rites. And the passage between the two extremes left the McQueen man looking a little shipwrecked by life.Fabrics were bleached, faded as though they'd been left in the sun. Frayed jacquards, worn brocades, and tarnished buttons also suggested some environmental distress. Some of the clothes had a slightly improvised feel: a coat lining, say, worn as a silk robe, or exaggerated versions of Edwardian underthings worn as outerwear. There was a hint of DIY ingenuity in the black roses embroidered in a cotton ticking jacket (one way to turn something prosaic into something precious for someone who is stranded without much). The interplay of unhinged and aristocratic suggested a scenario in which the Lord of the Flies was in the process of taking over Brideshead. And, if the haunted boniness of the young men parading backwards and forwards on the cobblestones under the arches was any indication, the process might almost be complete.
16 June 2013
There was no way to slot the ten outfits that were shown as Alexander McQueen's Fall collection into the general spectrum of the season. The handful of looks (really, it was five, plus a variant of each) was created while Sarah Burton was in the last stages of pregnancy. The precedents for such a situation in fashion are few and far between. Phoebe? Stella? Burton's aesthetic has always been much more convoluted than her peers anyway, so the extraordinary circumstance in which she found herself just amplified something that was already there.That something first appeared in her pre-fall collection, with its focus on the humble piety of Low Church Anglicans. Quite why this should occur to Burton as the genesis of a fashion collection is the sort of divine inspiration that is best left to her and her maker. But its elevation to the full-blown extravagance of the ten looks shown here perversely made a lot more sense. If pre-fall was about humility and purity, Fall nailed the excesses of Catholicism in a way that would have warmed the heart of ferocious anti-papist Lee.Burton divided the ten into five subgroups: Communion, nuns, cardinals, popes, and angels. In a scarcely believable but timely twist for McQueen, Britain's most senior Catholic cardinal has just stepped down in the wake of one of those sex scandals that endlessly plague the Vatican in the twilight of its domain. Burton coincidentally garbed her cardinal duo in outfits that would have done a Vegas showgirl—or a cross-dressing cleric—proud. And, bearing in mind the about-to-be-well-documented propensity of clergymen for outré behavior, she dressed her papal twosome as right royal queens of the British Isles.It was a brief but glorious pageant, staged in the appropriately OTT Opéra Comique, with all the subversive glee that one could wish to be attached to a McQueen attack on the propriety of church and state. The technique was obsessive to a fault—two weeks per outfit, ventured one awestruck source. Backstage, the models loomed head and shoulders above the minions fluttering around them. As they idly contemplated their pearl knuckle-dusters and languidly sipped sodas through the cages that framed their faces, they could scarcely have known that their gilded perfection was the most sublimely punkish assault on orthodoxy.Sothat'swhat's on a girl's mind when she's having twins.
4 March 2013
From those early heretical spectacles in deconsecrated churches, religiosity has always been a McQueen signature, but Sarah Burton added extraordinary new layers with her pre-fall collection for the label. For anyone not versed in the intricacies of Anglican worship, all one needed to know was that Burton wanted to evoke the humility and purity of low-church Anglicanism, rather than its incense-and-ritual high-church counterpart. Hence, the dusty, frayed quality of a bonded velvet coat-dress, whose silhouette recalled the cassock of a humble parish priest. Or the penitential quality of a pintucked shirtdress in plain white cotton. Or even the way that a white capelet laid over a black velvet column looked like a nun's wimple. And the big Puritan buckles on the footwear were perfectly suited to Pilgrim mothers.Even in McQueen terms, the scenario was arcane to the nth. It was complicated further by looks that conveyed a muted opulence. The best examples: the black velvet dress with a keyhole neckline and cuffs outlined in a stiff white ruff of organza, and another gown, also black, with huge sweeping wings of red velvet (positively demonic, that one). True, there was still a rigorous purity to the actual line of the clothes, but they were more suggestive of aristocratic pride than humble devotion. Like the panniered gown in communion lace that came draped in a cape covered with arabesques of piping that were almost rococo—innocence and decadence in a single outfit.The clothes had a monumental quality—long, lean, architectural—as unyielding as classic Balenciaga, another designer who was much inspired by priestly garments. Majestic they may have been, but there was something chilly and slightly forbidding about them. Still, the collection was many times bigger than the images you see here, so rest assured that Burton managed to transmute the grandeur into something infinitely more wearable at the more commercial end of McQueen's pre-fall spectrum.
15 January 2013
The worn vintage setting, the forensic lighting, and the fractured buzz of the soundtrack already felt like elements of a U.K. edition of Ryan Murphy's TV fright festAmerican Horror Story. Then, into this environment stepped a pinstriped android, face masked in plastic, hair immaculately marceled into place. This scarily implacable vision—another time, another monster—was a startling way for Sarah Burton to introduce Alexander McQueen's menswear to London.The label recently opened a men's shop on Savile Row, where Beau Brummell kick-started male style as we now understand it more than two centuries ago, where McQueen himself began his career more than two decades ago, so there was purest logic to the attention paid to hyper-tailored tradition, and its roots in military dressing. But it was purest McQueen to explode that tradition, fracturing the pinstripes, patchworking the classicism, layering a velvet jacket over a silk dressing gown for the kind of languidly decadent effect that is as timeless as Oscar Wilde's prose.If there was something theatrically showy—even creepy—about the result, it only helped guarantee that Burton's debut on London's menswear stage was utterly unforgettable.
7 January 2013
Everything about bees was an endlessly rewarding inspiration for Sarah Burton's new Alexander McQueen collection. Forget the obvious—she has, after all, proved herself the McQueen Bee with a spectacular string of buzzy fashion coups. Instead, think about a honey-based color palette, plus the patterning possibilities of comb, plus the frisson of the bee sting, plus the salient fact that Burton is an expectant mother. All of which equals a collection as conceptual and precise as anything from Lee McQueen's heyday, but with an added—and odd—intimacy. To be honest, it felt slightly mad. The models' heads were covered in archly modernist beekeepers' veils. The clothes they wore refracted a honeycomb motif through a dozen wasp-waisted guises, bound, haltered, and harnessed in a tortoiseshell that could quite equally have been a rich, sweet toffee. The hyper-exaggerated female silhouette was derived from the pinups of Alberto Vargas. "Celebratory," said Burton. "Back to womanhood after last season's overblown proportions." Eroticism was a touchstone: a cheeky bra strap here, a body in resin tortoiseshell there. The sinuous drape of a red dress over a honeycomb bustier would have been enough to raise Vargas himself from the dead. But what would he have made of dresses as structured as a Tudor gown? Or a full-skirted yellow extravaganza that looked as though it had been designed to galvanize bees from here to eternity? It was even more spectacular in red. In fact, so saccharine that the show could only close with the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar." And that was the sting—sweetness that would choke a diabetic.Like her mentor, Burton used a fashion show as an opportunity to register a statement of intent. There was a real coherence to her new collection—thank you, Buzzy—but it will be interesting to see how she translates it into something more accessible. Hers is a great story. Everyone should hear it.
1 October 2012
The mood boards in the McQueen studio are such tattletales. The ones for Spring 2013's menswear, for instance, had pictures of Marc Bolan, Lucian Freud, Picasso, and William Powell, and a huge amount of space devoted to the German conductor Herbert von Karajan. "Male vanity," said Sarah Burton. Or did she mean "vain men"? There is a difference, after all.But where difference was, surprisingly,lesssignificant was in the relationship between McQueen's menswear and its women's Resort collection. Burton and her team's pursuit of a world of extreme beauty trailed effortlessly from one to the other. Motifs that had already been seen in Resort reappeared here: the cicada wing pattern on a trench in black and white, or a blouson in gold; the Art Deco dragonflies winging across a tuxedo; the bullion dot embroidery on a pale silver suit and matching coat; the patchworked gold jacquard suit, as dense and lavish as the surface of a painting by Gustav Klimt.The designer mentioned Dorian Gray and Visconti'sDeath in Veniceas reference points. The mood of a decadent old Europe was captured in a silk-cotton jacquard based on the bathroom tiles of a grand hotel. There was also a jacquard inspired by the etching on the glass you might find in that same bathroom, and a pattern lifted from a tablecloth in that same hotel.But Burton was keen to point out that such historical references hardly did the collection full justice. "We wanted to make this collection more graphic," she said. "Morereal." To that end, there was a new, more relaxed feel in the tailoring. And it felt like there was less of the character-driven theatrics that have always powered McQueen's menswear. A mac in a flesh-toned leather felt almost…normal…in this context. But there was ultimately no getting round the heritage. A mac took its shape from a military frock coat. The white evening jacket with its black silk lapel that is the latest flowering of McQueen's collaboration with the Savile Row tailor Huntsman was lined in kimono silk. "Reality" for McQueen is still a world of private, indulgent pleasure.
24 June 2012
David Bowie's presence in the world of music may have faded, bar the occasional extravagant repackaging of a classic album or two, but he has taken on a second life in fashion, name-checked more than any other influence over the past few years. Sarah Burton can claim a personal connection. She worked with the man when Lee McQueen designed a Union Jack frock coat for the cover of Bowie'sEarthlingalbum in 1997. But for the McQueen Resort collection, Burton went much further back, to Bowie at his most creatively and visually extreme in the mid-seventies.It was extremity she was after, too. "I wanted to bring everything back to the body," Burton said at a preview in her London studio. "The proportions are extreme: high waists, an elongated leg, a peaked shoulder. There's a harder, more precise, masculine edge that's a reaction to the roundness and the sickly-sweet femininity of the last collection." And so, unsurprisingly, the anchor of the new lineup was the trouser suit, in a masculine/feminine iteration that led Burton inevitably to David Bowie's door. (Check the back cover ofHunky Doryif you're curious.) She acknowledged that, because the collection was the most rigorous she'd ever created, it was more difficult to make it beautiful, especially given that, however "sickly-sweet" her last outing might have been, it also ravished the eye to a degree that is rare in ready-to-wear. It was a challenge she addressed with her usual facility with extraordinary fabrics and embellishments.Art Deco was an inspiration. A gilded metallic jacquard was cut into a long, lean suit. Another suit was painstakingly embroidered with silvery dots, as iridescent as the wings of the dragonfly motif that was also on loan from the Deco era. An equally gilded symmetrical pattern of cicada wings echoed the Egyptomania that followed the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922. Never say that a McQueen collection isn't a visual education of some kind. (Come to think of it, that's exactly how each new Bowie incarnation functioned, too.) But if that sounds oh-so serious, the effect was as much Glam Rock as Gilded Age (and that was even before we got to the pieced snakeskin).The most rigorous parts of the collection were the tailored black pieces. Look closely, however, and their lapels and piping were actually trompe l'oeil encrustations of beading. Still, theyweredemandingly spare. Hard looks for hard times, perhaps. The eveningwear was long and lean, too.
Which is where the Burton Effect came to play, as an extravagant, yes,hyper-femininecounterpoint. A strapless jumpsuit, lavished with avian and floral embroideries, had a forgiving volume. Burton called it a "banana leg." Even more winning: another jumpsuit, also strapless, in a drape of fiery orange jersey so voluminous it threw shade on Bowie's most extreme Kansai Yamamoto outfits. The only possible accessory? The shoes whose rounded transparent heels were filled with glitter.
21 June 2012
The floor of the Salle Wagram still bears the marks of the track that was laid out for Alexander McQueen's show in October 2003, the one that re-created the last-man-standing dance marathon fromThey Shoot Horses, Don't They?. That particular presentation found savage beauty in darkness and despair. Quintessential McQueen, in other words. But today, Sarah Burton well and truly laid those old ghosts to rest with a show that celebrated, in her words, "a beautiful future, positivity, optimism."Burton described shapes and patterns that would organically "explode" as the show reeled on. So the first short, shaped skirts were "pods," initially in graphic jacquards, with decoration embedded in the fabric. Then they began to open out, first into cherry blossoms (maybe it was that Japanese connotation that triggered visions of a manga army with the models' uniform white wigs, sci-fi visors, andRollerballbooties), next into "doilies" of laser-cut ponyskin mounted on leather, and finally fur pompoms. Then the pods exploded, like puffballs, into extravagantly shaggy shapes in goat fur, ostrich feather, or Mongolian lamb, their shivering undulation evoking another organic association: anemones swaying in the tide."The future's usually shown as stark and cold," said Burton. "I wanted lightness, the sense that the dresses were hovering." One tiered dress, sprinkled with "dandelions" that looked like they were floating on air, had 80 godets, according to the woman who sewed it. The number of dandelions, she had totally lost count of. There were probably a dozen other such stats, underscoring how obsessive Burton's remarkable vision is (a quality she shares with her late mentor). Backstage before the show, nine people surrounded a huge froth of deep pink organza, hand-massaging its multilayers to bring them to life. The dress itself stood to silent attention, like an object of cultish worship—the cult being, of course, beauty.The show's progression from pure white to the grandest possible finale of red and black felt like a journey from innocence to experience. Burton's own story, in other words. "I pushed myself more," she acknowledged. "It has to move forward." Even those in the audience who queried the absence of anything approaching clothes for the everyday surrendered to the forward movement of the stunning technique. As for pushing herself, Burton has tapped a vein of absolute magic. Its spell is irresistible.
5 March 2012
"I love a gown," sighed Sarah Burton as she wandered around the racks of her pre-fall collection for Alexander McQueen. She'd come up with some doozies, like the high-necked, full-sleeved Victorian confection in black mousseline that invoked the spirit of Charles Frederick Worth, fashion's first couturier, or the gown whose torso was crusted with floral embroidery. Best of all was a strapless spectacular embroidered with the same blowsy tulips that made Burton's new men's collection so special. It fell away in draped folds of silk jacquard that recalled the monumental silhouettes of Charles James, a designer loved by Lee McQueen.This was grand McQueen, the kind of museum-worthy stuff that sustains the legend with its almost operatic lavishness. Burton does it brilliantly. There were other things here that were scarcely less elaborate. The strapless, flared cocktail dress in pleated smocked velvet, for instance, in a shade of green so dark that it seemed to drain light from the room as it quivered and undulated like an alien life form. Or the cape-backed emerald dress veiled in a lace that was practically three-dimensional. It was a whisper from purest couture. You couldfeelthe obsession in such exquisitely realized pieces, which is why they bordered on the overwrought.And which is why the most suggestive elements of Burton's pre-fall collection were the plainest: the cropped pants with a little kick in the back that she paired with white poplin shirts—or maybe a peasant blouse—and jacket shapes mutated from menswear. It was a different kind of silhouette for Burton. "I've raised the waist, kept the peplum, but moved away from the pencil skirt," she explained. There was still a flavor of McQueen drama, but the taste was fresh. It left you wanting a whole lot more.
16 January 2012
When words likeobsessionandfetishcross the lips of Sarah Burton, you know you're in for a theme park ride through the sparkled, darkling world that Alexander McQueen bequeathed to fashion. It's not anything Burton shies away from. In fact, with her new menswear collection, she talked about creating "the male equivalent of the McQueen woman." Her aim was most obvious in a mini-capsule of bespoke pieces that will be made to order in tandem with the Savile Row tailors Huntsman: a dinner jacket, a Prince of Wales check double-breasted suit, a black cashmere double-breasted overcoat.The formality of that deal set the tone for the rest of the collection. The starting point was portraits from the original nineteenth-century version of the magazineVanity Fair, depicting characters high and low, from politicians to poachers. That dichotomy was typical McQueen, so you got the boy in britches, the man in the high-breaking, double-breasted, pinstriped suit. But the lapel of his suit was needle-punched, the trousers had a stretch component. Defying the connotations of costume is something that Burton has proved herself expert at. On the other hand, costume is one of the unabashed glories of the McQueen legacy, because it offers the opportunity to assume a character that is enchantingly alien to the everyday. So there were clothes here that one would not don lightly. Like the coat in a bronze cotton sateen. Or the jumper and matching waistcoat, embroidered with blowsily decadent tulips. Or the suit in a dark jacquard of raven feathers. They were all so beautiful that they offered instant transport into an alternative realm. Returning to earth, Burton proved she could address modern times with something as clever as a felted wool bomber that was needlepointed on its leather sleeves, or a dressy evening jacket that was actually ivory knit. And she paid homage to McQueen's East End roots with a double-breasted pinstriped suit that was quintessential old-style gangster, like Johnny Shannon inPerformance. No, better make that James Fox.Muchbetter-looking.
15 January 2012
If the day began with Prospero's aquatic sorcery at Chanel, it ended with a different kind of underwater magic at Alexander McQueen. Lagerfeld's models were nymphs; Sarah Burton's were goddesses. She based her collection on the three Gs: Grès for the pleating and draping, Gaudí for the architecture, and Gaia for the sense of all-encompassing oceanic life that infused the clothes, like the outfits composed of coral or shells. Or the incredible engineered matelassé jacquard in a barnacle pattern. Or the silk chiffon in an oyster print, which had been layered, cut into circles, and ribbed (though that hardly even begins to explain the complexity of the result). And if you carried the analogy still further, the black leather appliqué that infected a lace dress could be an oil slick; the Fortuny-pleated organza woven with copper, silver, and gold was like a pirate's buried treasure.The details of the clothes were so obsessively conceived and realized, they could have easily sunk the clothes. That did, after all, happen with Lee McQueen now and again. But Burton has already won kudos for her woman's touch, which has literally lifted the collection. The raised waist here was an exaggerated Empire line of ruffles, which undulated as the models walked, "like a jellyfish moves in the sea," said the designer. It was most striking in an apricot baby doll, one of Burton's personal favorites. In the same vein, she compared the movement of a trapeze dress to swimming. Another dress, as pale, ruffled, and fragile as a peignoir, rolled like surf.But this collection proved how hot-wired into the core of McQueen Burton truly is. The color palette—as translucent as the inside of a shell—had the kind of unambiguous prettiness that McQueen himself might have felt inclined to disrupt in some way. Burton duly injected the glossy black leather—a sinister barracuda slipping through the shoals of shimmer, like the spirit of her erstwhile mentor. She'll never escape him; nor, it seems, does she want to.
3 October 2011
"Romantic Utility" may have been the idea that motivated Sarah Burton for McQueen's resort collection, but those two words inspired the extraordinary image of an Englishwoman caught up in the turmoil of a faraway war at the same time as she was ensnared by the alien beauty of the local culture.Empire of the Sun, in other words. You could wonder if that was some kind of metaphor for Burton's own situation after weathering the media storm of a royal wedding, but there was a distinct period feel in the nipped-waist jackets and mid-calf skirts with a kick pleat, or the jacket and skirt inspired by the lace of a Victorian tablecloth. The utilitarian side of the collection was embodied by cotton drill, pieced together in different military greens. And there was exotica in the ocelot print on a blouse and a full-skirted cocktail dress, or the embroidery that brought together Africa and India in shelled, beaded, and mirrored clusters of decoration.The introduction of cotton to the McQueen vocabulary was exactly the kind of user-friendly addition we can expect now that Burton's in charge. "Cotton makes it real," she said, at the same time as she was contemplating a rail of clothing that nudged resortwear into the realm of couture. That face-off between reality and fantasy felt like quintessential, paradoxical McQueen. Here, it wasn't simply the extreme tailored silhouette and the ornate surface treatments. There was also a pieced leather biker jacket with an ocelot back and a trick lapel in cotton. Or a cocktail sheath whose bodice was embroidered in gold bullion that melted into black embroidery which, in turn, infected the faille dress beneath. That's even before we got to the evening dresses, dipped in gold for twenty-first-century princesses.
20 June 2011
"English rock," the stated inspiration for the Alexander McQueen men's show today, embraces a multitude of possibilities, from the indie-est shoe-gaze to the most flagrant theater, with armies of fans embracing each and every one of them. And that's what seeped through the collection that Sarah Burton offered. Her love for what she does found a theme that loved her back.It's a funny coincidence that Raf Simons used the Jil Sander collection he showed the other day to telescope half a century's worth of style into a single fashion statement. Burton made it easier on herself by more or less addressing one decade—the sixties—from its mod onset to its Dionysian conclusion. Although it wasn't strictly Mick and the Stones that Burton had on her mind, you could whisk up a little through-line if you followed the show from its checked and striped beginning to the white-jeans-and-Chelsea-boots moment to the red-velvet dandyism to subverted Savile Row. Then there was that flouncy white thing Jagger wore for the band's legendary free concert in Hyde Park followed by a climax in jet-beaded, fedora-ed decadence when rock's "Satanic Majesties" danced with the devil and got burned by hellfire. All of this was happening while Stevie Ray Vaughan did his level best on the soundtrack to prove that he was Jimi Hendrix's equal when it came to "Voodoo Child"'s feedback freak-out.Never mind reading too much into a fashion show, the dark drive of the presentation certainly played into the McQueen spirit. Burton continued to evolve what is becoming a signature dialogue between tailored precision and easy volume: a puce tail coat over elasticized-waist pajamalike pants, for instance, or a striped, double-breasted jacket over Lurex-shot pants that, again, could have been pj's. She also struck a skillful balance between the measured—the three-piece suit—and the extreme—the flames that consumed a jacket and matching shirt. Those are two radically different markets right there, and signs are that Burton is perfectly capable of steering a steady course between them.
19 June 2011
Sarah Burton definitely isn't shying away from the weight of legacy she's inherited. Her venue was La Conciergerie, Marie Antoinette's prison and the site of an Alexander "Lee" McQueen show that was made memorable by the presence on the catwalk of live wolves (doped-up wolves or perhaps just some particularly lupine dogs, but still). No such threat of danger tonight, though the crackling neon lights were a reminder of McQueen's asylum show and the theme—"The Ice Queen and her court"—had the suitably chilly ring of a vintage McQueen ritual. The collection furthermore drew on what the show notes called "heritage silhouettes."What this all boiled down to was Burton skimming off the top of her vast reconceptualization of the house aesthetic to produce three dozen couture pieces reflecting that aesthetic at its purest. Literally. As in white-light burning bright. In the frenzied backstage press of congratulations, the designer could barely gasp one word to define her intent: "Icy." But it wasn't really that cold. What Burton designed had a blurry-edged softness, which came from the fur that lined hems, cuffs, and shoulder seams. The material wrapped the skirt of a drop-waist halterneck dress or swathed the hood of a sleeveless sheath. And when it wasn't fur, it was frayed, streaming organza that blurred the lines. (Amid such extravagant touches, you weren't likely to forget the rumor that Kate Middleton has selected the house to design her wedding gown.)Still, these were scarcely clothes for the real world. That wasn't really the point. It felt much more like Burton wanted to remind the planet that she isn't channeling the McQueen DNA, sheisthe McQueen DNA. Hence, those heritage silhouettes with their buoyant trains of silk organza or undulating threads of tulle or the harnesses that evoked such deliberately troubling associations. The most (quietly) spectacular piece was a gown with a body collaged from broken china, which erupted into a froth of organza. McQueen himself might have injected an edge of barely suppressed violence into such a piece. Here, serenity ruled. Which, in the interests of future princesses everywhere, is probably a wise option.
7 March 2011
"They go into shops at the same time," said Sarah Burton, to explain her canny alignment ofMcQueen's huge (250-piece) pre-fall collection for women with the men's collection she showed in Milan the other day. So you could find the same hints of regimental dressing, the same military touches. Well, "hints" is misleading, because the overwhelming impression was anything but understated. A navy officer's coat swagged with gold? Sailor pants reconfigured as a dress through the magic of trompe l'oeil? A slender pantsuit of navy felt trimmed with red, which switched the gender of Manet's immortal Drummer Boy? They were merely the beginning. Burton pointed to some decorative elements on lapels and necklines and said they'd been inspired by the Order of the Garter, one of the highest honors that British royalty can bestow. But her version had the extravagant exuberance of Louis XIV and the Sun King's court.The designer also said she was getting more comfortable with working on the stand, like McQueen himself used to, and one bias-cut beauty—maybe it started life as an officer's coat, but it had been dissected and draped diagonally across the body, with a bodice of crusted crystal and gold beading attached—was all it took to prove Burton right.At a pinch, that outfit, with its vague roots in something uniform, would probably fit with Burton's insistence that she was attempting "to make luxury in an austere way." That aim was also why she emphasized the uniform silhouettes of a group of pieces in the hottest, pop-est red and pink. But austerity was frankly doomed when there were opulent jacquards to match, and a pink fox chubby to throw over the whole lot. And Burton was clearly as comfortable with such indulgences as she was with the literally weightier elements in the McQueen collection. Meanwhile, the girl—or at least one of her dresses—made it to the White House, when Michelle Obama wore McQueen to the State Dinner. That's one thing that might take alittlemore getting used to.
18 January 2011
See enough shows in a season and you'll likely tire of the same old faces trooping up and down the catwalks with ticktock regularity. They're walking coat hangers. But every so often, there's a show where the model casting adds so much to the mood of the collection that you're left wondering why more designers don't step outside the box of the mannequins of the moment. It happened withAlexander McQueentonight. The face of each model was such a complement to the clothes he was wearing that the English quintessence of the collection was strikingly reinforced. For all anyone knew, the guys might have been from Kentucky or Kazakhstan, but dressed in McQueen, they were rough trade for Oscar Wilde, or stiff-upper-lippers in a Powell and Pressburger celluloid classic from the second World War, or military cadets from the Napoleonic Wars. The genetic blessing of bone structure and Guido Palau's spic-and-span public schoolboy hair had something to do with the effect, but ultimately, it was Sarah Burton's clothes that enabled the models to communicate a sweep of English man style.Burton projects McQueen's historicism and romanticism with an almost scary effortlessness, but she brought her own irreverent openness to the collection, the track pants paired with oversize military-influenced outerwear being one example. There was camp drama in those coats—and in the big plaid poncho. If that felt like genuine McQueen-iness, the designer elsewhere dialed down the drama for some sterling tailoring. One jacket was as soft as a cardigan, another had a firm, squared shoulder, still another was peaked, pagodalike. Burton has her mentor's eye for precision, and for print, too—there were engineered jacquards that duplicated the sheen of a regimental breastplate. To some eyes, they also suggested celestial clouds, which is scarcely an association one would care to dismiss.
16 January 2011
It's hard to conceive of a more thankless task in fashion than taking over from a designer as galvanizing as Alexander "Lee" McQueen, but Sarah Burton is precisely the kind of quiet powerhouse who has what it takes to grab hold of his legacy and drag it where it needs to go to survive and prosper. As much as she worked beside McQueen for 15 years and clearly had a symbiotic connection to his very particular vision, it's her gender that is her greatest asset and point of difference, at least as it shaped tonight's show. The very first outfit could stand as a manifesto for the future: The tail coat is a trad McQueen piece, but here it was softened, its edges unfinished, and the hard, peaked shoulders that were another McQueen signature had been slashed open, relaxed.Burton also softened the staging, a concept that was always so critical to a McQueen show. Where his narratives were often dark, discomfiting things, she opted for a nurturing atmosphere: a pagan, Earth-Mother-ly spirit. The woman in her show began as a plain white canvas and was steadily reclaimed by nature: wrapped in embroidered fronds, in leaves of black leather, in a raffia-trimmed brocade, in the wings of monarch butterflies or an enveloping mass of feathers. The craftsmanship was startling—that monarch butterfly dress, for instance, or a gown with a breastplate of gilded cornstalks and skirt of pheasant feathers, or another gown of pleated organza that looked like an unfolding sea anemone.What hadn't changed with this show was the fantasia that defined McQueen's work. Burton has already said that there were so many ideas left to be explored in her work with the designer. Now that she has proved her absolute fealty, her absolute familiarity, it's going to be riveting to watch her apply the craftsmanship and teamwork that made this collection such a success to a new vision for the house.
4 October 2010
Sarah Burton proved she's the only choice to expand on Lee McQueen's legacy with a Resort collection that effortlessly updated his design codes without losing his drama. There's so much great material lying fallow in old McQueen collections that it would overwhelm anyone without the empathy, experience, and ability to edit that Burton brings to a difficult job. For Resort, she confidently revisited some of her own favorite moments in her mentor's saga with a lightness that could be easily construed—for want of a better notion—as a woman's touch.For instance, a Victorian jacket was reconfigured as a white cotton shirtdress. But, more significantly for the future, proportions were lifted, with a higher waist taking some of the edge off of McQueen's traditional silhouette. It worked spectacularly well with evening dresses that fell away beautifully from the torso. One of them—in what looked like blood-drenched chiffon—evoked a vision of Isabelle Adjani inLa Reine Margot, one of McQueen's favorite movies. It seems a taste for the macabre comes as naturally to Burton as it did to him. She shares his instinct for extreme glamour, too. His Hollywood clientele will scarcely be disappointed by the tuxedo dress that was bifurcated by black lace.The tension between hardness and fragility that characterized McQueen's work was successfully sustained in defined shoulders (some armored like a samurai's) and tailored torsos that fell away into fins of diaphanousness. Burton continued to hybridize fabrics as she did in the Fall collection—lace transformed into chiffon in one cocktail dress.Touches like that should allay the inevitable fears of McQueen's fans that continuation of his line would involve some kind of sellout. Yes, there is more of what could pass for "daywear" here, but if Burton's collection is commercial, it's because it is direct. Pieces like the white kimono-sleeved coat-dress or the black dress in a lacquered raffia and organza have a straightforward chic.Burton hasn't neglected the dark romance, either—the brocades, the bullion embroidery are still here. She's simply let some light in.
20 June 2010
Funny how time slips away. Four months ago it seemed unthinkable, on an emotional level, that Alexander McQueen's label would survive his death. Then logic prevailed, with Sarah Burton, McQueen's second in command and the person who knew as well as anyone how he thought and worked, appointed as creative director. On the evidence of this Spring menswear collection, the transition could involve a reasonably seamless and subtle reworking of the house aesthetic.Despite the show's title, Pomp and Circumstance, it was as low-key as its mode of presentation. Maybe there was some pomp in the historicism of suppressed waists and high collars with a Regency flair, or in the cutaway jackets and morning suit striped pants. And the house's signature theatricality was certainly evident in a red and gold brocade coat, or the opium-den-worthy florid deconstructed redingote in vermilion velvet, worn with baggy trousers in an aboriginal silk print. But there was more humble circumstance in a fisherman's sweater, in an unstructured jacket in cashmere reconfigured to look like rough linen, and in an outrider's jacket in washed black leather that ended in an unhemmed skin. The truest reflection of the McQueen heritage was the sense of a story being told: Burton's interplay between aristo and working-class rough was the latest chapter in a book started nearly two decades ago.
19 June 2010
Alexander McQueen's last works were given final honors by his trusted team in a hushed and dignified showing that went to his core as a designer who scaled the heights of couture accomplishment. Sarah Burton, his right hand, described how, in beginning this collection, McQueen had turned away from the world of the Internet, which he had so powerfully harnessed in his last show. "He wanted to get back to the handcraft he loved, and the things that are being lost in the making of fashion," she said. "He was looking at the art of the Dark Ages, but finding light and beauty in it. He was coming in every day, draping and cutting pieces on the stand." The 16 outfits shown had been 80 percent finished at the time of his death.What McQueen was preparing had a poetic, medieval beauty that dealt with religious iconography while recapturing memories of his own past collections. He had ordered fabric that translated digital photographs of paintings of high-church angels and Bosch demons into hand-loomed jacquards, then taken the materials and cut stately caped gowns and short draped dresses. In its ornate surface narrative, that might read as a kick against the plain and restrained direction fashion is taking, but in their own way, the fluted, attenuated lines of his long dresses suggested a calm and simplicity. Instead of aggression, they transmitted the grace of the medieval Madonnas and Byzantine empresses McQueen had been studying.For anyone who had watched his development through the years, the references to milestone collections were apparent. The bandage-bound heads, some with feathered coxcombs, simultaneously called up the designer's rebel-British background and his landmark Asylum collection while also catching a likeness to the modest head coverings seen in Northern European medieval portraiture. When a high-collared, formfitting cutaway jacket made entirely from golden feathers appeared, it read as a direct retrieval of McQueen's first step into haute couture in his Icarus collection, after he took the helm of Givenchy in 1996 at the age of 27. This time, though, it was realized with even more skill, with a multilayered white tulle skirt sprinkled at the hem with delicate gilded embroidery.Somehow, that one outfit encapsulated everything about McQueen: both the tailoring and the romanticism.
Perhaps he wouldn't have chosen to show it in such a simple and intimate way—in a small, ornate room to privately invited groups of editors—because that left out the full realization of concept and showmanship that equally drove his creativity. But the circumstances, sad as they are, allowed his friends and colleagues to share a long and poignant moment to look at what the man achieved, and to grieve for him.
8 March 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
17 January 2010
It could be that Alexander McQueen—oh, and Lady Gaga, remotely—crashed through a whole new frontier in the projection of fashion shows as worldwide live entertainment Tuesday night. McQueen's collection, Plato's Atlantis, was live-streamed on Nick Knight's SHOWstudio.com, intercut with the photographer's premade video footage. That was the plan anyway, until 30 minutes before the show, Gaga Twittered that McQueen was about to premiere her new single. She has a million followers. Inevitably, before the crashing of the frontier could quite come about, SHOWstudio itself crashed. Which may have replicated, in a whole new audience, the sensation of a young hopeful stuck outside a McQueen presentation, waving a standing ticket and being unable to get in.Seen from on the spot, it was a big-budget production, for sure. There was a sparkling, illuminated runway in which two sinister, robotic movie cameras on gigantic black booms ran back and forth, while a screen played Knight's video of Raquel Zimmermann, lying on sand, naked, with snakes writhing across her body.Then the models came out, dressed in short, reptile-patterned, digitally printed dresses, their gangly legs sunk in grotesque shoes that looked like the armored heads of a fantastical breed of antediluvian sea monster. McQueen, according to an internal logic detailed in a press release, was casting an apocalyptic forecast of the future ecological meltdown of the world: Humankind is made up of creatures that evolved from the sea, and we may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap dissolves.The consequences, in fashion terms? Well, it was a one-note, unmissable formula of the kind several other designers have decided is the way to communicate this season. McQueen's message throughout was essentially sunk into the short dress—a steady development of his engineered sea-reptile prints, worked into a nipped-waist, belled-skirt silhouette. The colors—first green and brown, moving to aqua and blue—were exceptionally executed and swagged, and molded across panniered structures. Each dress was a work of computer-generated art crossbred with McQueen's couture-based signature cut.In a section in which it looked as if McQueen was envisaging a biological hybridization of women with sea mammals, there were trousers whose bulbous flanks mimicked the skin of sharks or dolphins.
A reminder of his taste in Savile Row tailoring came via a few looks in which formfitting gray men's fabric was cut away to reveal "portholes" filled with turquoise (an effect akin to the view from a glass-bottomed boat). Finally, then? Although there was nothing to show McQueen breaking out from his set design mold, the way he's embracing new computer technologies and the drama of the moving image puts him at the leading edge of change.
5 October 2009
Alexander McQueen's Resort collection had a lot in common with his recent menswear outing: Both were inspired by the notion of an artist in his studio. Hence the splatter effects, brushstroke and line-drawing prints, and a series of blue and white hand-painted pieces. Additionally, the women's line had a bit of romance in the form of lace overlays as delicate as insect wings. Still, fans of the graphic punch that is also part of McQueen's arsenal won't be at a loss: Amber Rose, sometime Kanye West main squeeze and one of this label's most visible supporters, could cause a stir in the leggings and the primary-colored Op-style prints.
16 July 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
20 June 2009
Alexander McQueen may be the last designer standing who is brave or foolhardy enough to present a collection that is an unadulterated piece of hard and ballsy showmanship. The heated arguments that broke out afterward were testament to that. There were those who found his picture of women with sex-doll lips and sometimes painfully theatrical costumes ugly and misogynistic. Others—mainly young spectators who haven't been thrilled by the season's many sensible pitches to middle-aged working women—were energized by the sheer spectacle, as well as the couture-level drama in the execution of the clothes.It was certainly meant as a last-stand fin de siècle blast against the predicament in which fashion, and possibly consumerism as a whole, finds itself. The set was a scrap heap of debris from the stages of McQueen's own past shows, surrounded by a shattered glass runway. The clothes were, for the most part, high-drama satires of twentieth-century landmark fashion: parodies of Christian Dior houndstooth New Look and Chanel tweed suits, moving through harsh orange and black harlequinade looks to revisited showstoppers from McQueen's own archive.The romantic side of McQueen's character, which rises intermittently in deliriously beautiful shows like his recent tribute to the Victorian empire, was emphatically in abeyance. This is a designer who has drawn so much poetry out of the past, yet this time his backward look appeared to be in something like anger, defiance, or possibly gallows humor. Some of the pieces, like a couple of swag-sided coats, seemed to be made of trash bags, accessorized with aluminum cans wrapped in plastic as headgear.Nevertheless, however frustrated McQueen may be by the state of commercial fashion, he was not really in absurdist rip-it-up mode. Whatever else is gnawing him, this is a man who will never compromise on construction and craftsmanship. This season, he'd noticeably forgone his typical carapace corsetry, making for slightly easier shapes, like boxy jackets, airy gazar dresses, and a fringed dogtooth sheath. For McQueen's faithful, there were also fiercely tailored coats, nipped in the waist and picking up on biker quilted leather and big-shouldered silhouettes. Evening-wise—sans the drag-queen makeup—there was a slim, black paillette homage-to-YSL wrapover dress with a red-lined hood that would stand up as elegant in any company.
Ultimately, for all the feathered and sculpted showpieces that must have taken hundreds of seamstress-hours to perfect, this was a McQueen collection that didn't push fashion anywhere new. Yet that seemed to be exactly one of the things he was pointing to: the state of a collapsed economy that doesn't know how to move forward.
9 March 2009
The two distinct stories in Alexander McQueen's pre-fall collection elaborated on the themes of the spectacular collection he showed for men in Milan. One group had what was described as "a Dickensian opium den feeling." Dresses were fitted with high necks and the occasional bustle. The second group was all about country pursuits: a riding jacket, jodhpurs, shearling maxi skirts, and chunky hand knits. But you scarcely needed those guidelines to appreciate the dazzling craftsmanship of the clothes. McQueen's skill as a cutter is beyond dispute, but it was still impressive to see the way he deconstructed a mac to create a bustle-skirt shape or slashed a peacoat so it could do double duty as a cape. The slashes were lined in red, wounds that could be the work of the Ripper. The coat's lining was a print of a buttoned chesterfield. It looked like the interior of a coffin, just the kind of macabre detail that McQueen fans expect.
19 January 2009
Alexander McQueen, environmentalist? That was the unexpected message that emanated from the mouth of a runway that was backed by a video projection of a revolving Earth, and flanked by a zoo of stuffed animals: an elephant, giraffe, polar bear, lion, and assorted other endangered species. McQueen explained, through program notes, that he had been pondering Charles Darwin, the survival of the fittest, and the deleterious results of industrialization on the natural world.Strangely, the thought didn't set off one of his angry forays into the destructive side of human psychology. If anything, the beginning of the show—the section that dealt with a world untouched by man—unbuttoned the romanticism and delicacy that is, paradoxically, the strongest side of McQueen's appeal. Though his shapes hardly wavered from his signature frock coats, skinny-leg pants, and hourglass silhouettes, the wood-print tailoring was more fluid and some of the dresses exceptional. Pink or lemon flowers were trapped beneath short, nude netting shifts, and two of the season's most sublime forms of fringing came draped across the body in dégradé gray or swishing in pink filaments from a flapper dress.McQueen's couture sensibilities are breathtaking in close-up, where the detail of flowers and birds becomes visible in lace underlayers and then echoed in lace ankle-wrappings incorporated in shoes. He also gave himself over to a long passage of bright, multicolored allover prints, engineered to fit around jackets, leggings, and cocoon dresses—new on the Paris runway, but also part of general trend emanating from London's young designers. Even as the show moved into evening and the part that symbolized the negative impact of twenty-first-century evolution, the black crystal-encrusted dresses and bodysuits never quite descended into melodrama. McQueen said he "doesn't want to preach" about such a serious subject. More likely, he wants to sell next Spring, and this collection, with its color, detail, and eased-up tailoring, looks likely to be one of his most commercially viable.
2 October 2008
Alexander McQueen showed his women's pre-spring collection on the runway alongside his Spring menswear "because they both go into the shop together," but also to mark the season's commercial importance. How reassuring to hear from the designer that 60 percent of his business comes from these gorgeous, uncompromising outfits. There have been times when McQueen seemed like the new Charles James, but here, he was all about Travis Banton—the Hollywood costume designer who made Marlene Dietrich into a goddess. "Über-partying, über-glamour" was McQueen's theme. His always acute tailoring flawlessly contoured jackets and jumpsuits to the body (an all-in-one tux had nouvelle Marlene all over it). Bias-cutting and draping produced impactful party dresses. The chiffon that veiled fishtailed dresses was exquisitely embroidered with koi or hummingbirds. And the designer insisted that a heavily beaded holographic sheath reminded him of Natasha Henstridge's second skin inSpecies. It wouldn't be McQueen without a horror-movie moment.
21 June 2008
"Love You," the invitation announced. As you moved it around, the lenticular lips puckered up with aRocky Horrorrelish. But what Alexander McQueen really wanted to convey was the "über glamour" of seventies discos (in fact, he said he wanted "_übe_r über"). With such a goal, his new collection was hardly going to speak to this particular season, which has already pitched its tent for pajamalike ease. And it wasn't actually a collection that spoke to warm weather in any shape or form, making the surface-of-the sun temperature in the show venue that much more intolerable. (One sympathized with the model who had to bear the final outfit, a metal-fronted, zip-backed jacket that must have felt like a giant, binding foundation garment.)Nevertheless, the clothes McQueen showed had a fetishistic power, which had everything to do with their intense focus on the body. Start with his tailoring, which defined aman'sbody (as opposed to the slender frames of the 90-pound weaklings that pass for mannequins on many catwalks). Add the panels of sheer fabric that allowed glimpses of the flesh moving beneath the garments, or the graphics that hinted at skeletal structure (the most spectacular were jacquard coils of smoke on the front of a jacket—they looked like a rib cage). Another alluring effect was the veiling laid over a jacket or tee. Curious that on the same day in Milan, two designers—McQueen and Miuccia Prada—should both toy with the idea of phantom garments. How does that improve your wardrobe, you ask? Well, it doesn't, but it's still a hell of a pretty idea.
21 June 2008
The one element that has gone missing in the collections is the spine-tingling, eye-welling emotion of a show so exceptional to witness that—despite all exhaustion, cynicism, and workaday pressures—it suddenly transforms being involved in fashion into a magical privilege. Just when it seemed like that feeling was virtually extinct, Alexander McQueen handed his audience a self-imagined fantasy of crinolined princesses and British-colonial romance of such beauty, it arguably surpassed anything he's achieved in 14 years."I've got a 600-year-old elm tree in my garden," he said, "and I made up this story of a girl who lives in it and comes out of the darkness to meet a prince and become a queen." After a trip to India, the designer worked like a fiend for months in his studio, with images of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and the Indian Empire running through his mind. They were transformed into ballerina-length multi-flounced dance dresses, each more insanely exquisite than the last: A miraculous red-feather-fronted number turned to burst into a froth of creamy frills in back; another came covered in baby-fine knitted lace; a third had a pair of peacocks—again fashioned from cutout black lace—with their tail feathers fanning out over ivory tulle petticoats.Interspersed were rigorously cut military tailcoats with taut pants detailed with military frogging, and slim brocade and cloque pantsuits with crisp white high-necked shirts. Then there was a stately parade of imperial-red and velvet jackets bedecked with millions of dollars' worth of antique Indian diadems and diamond neckpieces, and yet more incredible rich Empire-line saris and wispy dishabille transparencies. These were followed by a sequence of gold-encrusted, ermine-coated glory, echoing the heyday of Norman Hartnell and Hardy Aimes' fifties British couture as worn by Elizabeth II.Whatever had triggered this new lease of inspired design, it went further than the mere rendition of fanciful costume for the sake of telling a story. Importantly, McQueen finally found it in himself to quash the confining, uptight carapace that had held back former collections, replacing it with a new sense of lightness and femininity. Meanwhile, for all the transporting spectacle and extravagance, the narrative never submerged the sense that, within this wonder, there's plenty to wear, too. No coincidence, then, that McQueen today announced that his company has gone into profit for the first time.
It was a day when his brilliance had never shone more brightly.
28 February 2008
At some point in the recent past, Alexander McQueen took a month to travel around the Indian subcontinent. The trip was significant enough that he saw it as a pilgrimage. But how to incorporate such a realization into a fashion collection? McQueen endeavored to establish a mood by printing his own photo of Mount Everest on the show invitation and playing a soundtrack of wind howling at the roof of the world as the audience filed in. But after that? The music switched to eighties English indie (the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen), and the Enlightenment of the East—and all other ethnic inspirations—became an exotic accessory to what was fundamentally a collection of finely tailored suits, shirts, and trousers (and rather gorgeous shoes).To take one especially spectacular example: A traditional paisley pattern (Persian in origin) was embroidered on the sleeves of a coat, then it trailed off down the leg of the matching trousers before reappearing on the lapels of a suit and the shoulders of a sweater (which also featured a leopard-print collar). Here's another illustration: Sheeshedar, the mirrored Indian fabric you've seen in markets since time immemorial (or at least since hippies crossed the landmass from Asia to America), was used to make a pair of trousers—and matching shoes. Then it was teamed up with a poncho that could have been sliced from shaggy white yak wool. Just perfect for the backstage area of a Led Zeppelin reunion concert, but curiously incongruous for a McQueen fashion moment. Perhaps that was the problem with this show. Its polyglot Mongol-slash-MayaNational Geograph-ism felt like arbitrary window dressing for the designer's much darker, more refined aesthetic. Still, that cardigan with the attached blanket may come in handy for the next Ice Age.
12 January 2008
First, what must be said: Alexander McQueen's Spring collection was a tribute to the late Isabella Blow, the woman who discovered him, famously propelled his career from a student rack to a couture house, and faithfully wore his clothes—and Philip Treacy's hats—in their most extreme manifestations. Second, though: All terrible emotions apart, McQueen, like every other designer, can only be judged in the unsparing light of the general arena of fashion. To put it bluntly, this collection—after an off season last time—was going to stand or fall based on whether his clothes were any good.It stood. McQueen mustered the clarity to dispense with smoke and mirrors and show his capabilities in cut, drape, and feathered flourish to an audience near enough to inspect every detail. He stepped up to the plate by running through all his archived knowledge—Savile Row tailoring in Prince of Wales menswear check jackets and strict, strong-shouldered suiting, combined with the legacy of his couture experience in fan-pleated chiffon, goddess-y drape, and hand-crafted drama. The theme of birds—particularly symbolic of Blow—held the show together through a reprise of all the highlights of McQueen's career. The molded-hip silhouette of a jacket and dusty, twisted georgette gowns came from his Barry Lyndon show; the floating bird-of-paradise prints, from his "shipwreck" season; the ombré-printed vast-shouldered kimonos, from his Japanese couture collection for Givenchy; the trapezoid shapes, transposed from the tricorne hats of his "highwayman" moment; the lace stockings, reprised from hisThey Shoot Horses…performance. And so on.But this isn't really the point. McQueen has indulged in self-referential wallows in the past before, but this, for the most part, avoided that feeling. If some of his carapace-stiff shapes are as unviable as they ever were, the airy rainbow-bird-wing-printed pleating, an Art Nouveau-patterned blouse, and his romantic fairy-goddess chiffons put him back in the game of current trend (though they'd have been better without the fierce waist-cinching belts that looked like a hangover from winter). In all, McQueen honored his mentor by striving to bring out the best in himself.
5 October 2007
There has been such a wave of surfing-related material recently that it's a wonder it's taken so long to filter into fashion. Well, surf is finally up for spring 2008. Alexander McQueen's latest collection offered the most precise exposition on the theme, partly because his inspiration (a 1961 LeRoy Grannis image of a kid surfing in black suit and white shirt) was so clear and so compatible with his own sense of theatrics, but more because McQueen is naturally drawn to any rebel spirit. Translation: His laid-back surfer dudes were fused with fifties bad boys in glittery rockabilly quiffs, tailored drapes, and drainpipes. For spring, the designer trawled across a landscape of idealized Americana, drawing together elements as typically contradictory as ten-pin bowlers (shoes and blousons), hippies (T-shirts embroidered with flowers and "LOVE," a print composed of sixties slogans—ah, yes, sock it to 'em!), and college students (letterman jackets with embroidered tigers). Neoprene leggings directly referenced the inspiration, but the surf print on an immaculately tailored jacket and the flamingo print that decorated shirts and linings were more subtle evocations of the theme.If it felt generally too studied and several continents away from McQueen's usual obsessions, there was always the surfer's credo of freedom and flight to ground the collection in the designer's own needs. And a muted finale of drowned boys in dripping-wet suits brought the show back to its source.
23 June 2007
In a season when the agendas of fashion are finally being rewritten, all a professional audience really comes to Paris for is to witness brilliant designers working on modern cut for twenty-first-century life—and to inspect it in close-up. Even on a Friday night, in rain and heavy weekend traffic, they will drag themselves to an inhospitable sports venue at the ends of the Périphérique to see an Alexander McQueen show with just those expectations. Unfortunately, the audience was confronted with a distracting, overwrought show that only succeeded in ramming home the realization that the theatrics and stadium-sized presentations of the nineties are—or rather should be—a thing of the past.To be fair, McQueen had put a heartfelt personal passion into a collection that was based on a startling revelation from his family history. His mother, who traces family trees, discovered that her bloodline leads back to a victim of the Salem witch trials who was hanged in the Puritan hysteria of 1692. The themes of witchcraft, paganism, and religious persecution played on the dark and angry side of McQueen's creativity, but the way he articulated them ultimately ended in one of the season's most deleterious cases of concept overwhelming clothes.First of all, there was a pentagram traced in red in a black-sand circle, with an inverted pyramid hanging over it. As the show started, a macabre film—of naked women, swarming locusts, faces decaying to skulls, and blood and fire—started to play above the models' heads. Theoretically, no one objects to being disturbed and discomforted by a pointed McQueen performance—it's an accepted part of his identity. What they did object to was that the point was lost in the distractions, and what interesting clothes did emerge could barely be appreciated at the distance he put between models and audience.The clothes were there, as far as it was possible to see. The opening of the show proved McQueen is thinking about new shape, in this case pod-like structures that broke the mold of his usual corseted silhouette. The volumes, shown over black leather leggings, moved toward a curved-back, forward-facing shape that put him somewhere in line with other experiments that are going on in Paris.
McQueen's research on religion had found links between ancient Egypt and the folk culture of the earliest British immigrants to the New World, so there were Nefertiti hairdos and couture-detailed clothes fashioned to mimic the lapis lazuli and gold of sarcophagi. One blue dyed fur was shaved and shaded like overlapping feathers, and a gilded column and green jersey gown with coiled snakes at the breast looked fit for Elizabeth Taylor starring as Cleopatra.After that, though, it swiftly became a bumpy and difficult ride. Quieter pieces like a cardigan dress, a nipped-waist parka, and a shearling skirt (core items that sell so well for McQueen) got drowned by the gore flowing on the screens. At the end, there were some of the gowns he is so good at—a trail of emerald velvet with copper bugle-beaded strands of hair spilling to the waist, and a chic black silver-beaded gown that rippled from the shoulder line as it moved. Still, even those didn't have the power to fill the space or to placate an audience driven to the end of its tolerance by an experience that—journey and waiting-in-the-dark time included—took four hours. McQueen is too talented to get stuck in an outdated habit of presentation like this.
1 March 2007
It's telling that when Alexander McQueen conceded an interest in superheroes for his new collection, the first creature that sprung to his mind was a warlock. Let's face it—he's always found the dark side a much more inspiring proposition than its sweetness 'n' light alternative, and for that we can all be heartily grateful, especially when it yields a collection as startling and individual as this. In purely technical terms, McQueen mastered a striking repertoire of effects, such as the silvery glaze on a gray flannel suit, the plastic coating on a Prince of Wales check, or the taffeta-and-felt bonding that turned scuba neoprene into the stuff of jackets and pea coats. Only McQueen could make a conceptual point of the interplay between the most luxurious natural fibers and the most Hazmat-toned synthetics (orange nylon was a particular standout).But that is hardly why McQueen's work continues to enthrall, even as his creativity ebbs and flows. He's the most cinematic of designers, and with this collection, he offered up a vision that combined the broad-shouldered, immaculately-tailored elegance of haute Hollywood with a dystopian futurism that left his models looking like glassy-eyed replicants. It was extraordinary, if a bit deadening. Still, the bugle-beaded jackets that McQueen presented as a finale must surely stand as the new century's definitive statement on male glamour—until his own next show, at least.
14 January 2007
The story of the last few years of Alexander McQueen has been a long, frequently angry tussle between his love of grand theatrics (which often deflect energy and attention from the clothes) and the more sullen straight-up parades flung on to appease the commercial guys (which only deflate his critics' expectations). For the first time, his spring collection resolved those conflicting tensions in a presentation, staged in the round in the Cirque d'Hiver, that framed all his romantic, historicist accomplishments without veering too far in either direction.An ensemble of musicians and a dusty chandelier gave just enough background atmosphere to sustain the sequence of gracefully detailed Edwardiana, infanta dresses, and sharp signature tailoring. His collection notes quoted Barry Lyndon, Goya, and the Marchesa Casati, but really this was a revision of all the things the designer does best. Going back over his own history—as well as favorite points in fashion history—is something McQueen has done before; in this case it improved the sense of lightness and delicacy in his clothes. Nineteenth-century bodice-fitted jackets came out with chiffon jabot blouses and long skirts, followed by corseted dresses—some with hard, hip-exaggerated hourglass carapaces—which bloomed into lace-covered skirts. A palette of dusty gray, ivory, and faded pinks added to the poetic rendering of skills he has perfected over the years—both during his stint in couture at Givenchy and at the atelier he maintains in London to make wedding and special-occasion dresses.From this last, perhaps, and the young clients who come there, he's learned about the softness a woman wants in a romantic dress today. Still, the standouts were a couple of more modern looks perfect for less dressy evenings: gray pants with versions of the season's tunics over them, one in asymmetric tiers of dusty-rose lace, and the other a gold-leaf-tinged elongated T-shirt. Looking at it from a broader perspective, it's true to say that this self-referential McQueen collection did not contribute to the new debate about how fashion can move on from its fixation with the past. But as a summation of all he has to offer in the way of refinement, it was one of his best.
5 October 2006
Alexander McQueen's collections veer between extremes of creative profligacy and gimlet-eyed focus. His menswear for spring 2006 was an instance of the latter. The show was called "Harlem," a name that—in McQueen's mind, at least—doesn't only refer to the uptown NYC neighborhood. It's also an anagram of Mahler, whose music was used in Luchino Visconti'sDeath in Venice, the 1971 film adaptation of Thomas Mann's story of a turn-of-the-century composer obsessed with a beautiful young man. If that sounds like more backstory than one collection can handle, the designer somehow pulled it off, reconciling Visconti's fin-de-sièscle gorgeousness with the sartorial precision of Harlem's famously stylish dandies.McQueen went to town on the tailoring. The lapel of a Prince of Wales jacket was duded up with checked trim; the dogtooth pattern of a pair of trousers was picked out on the lapel of the accompanying jacket. And thebroderie anglaisethat decorated another jacket trailed down the matching trouser leg. These details were impressive in their delicacy. In fact, delicacy was the leitmotif of the collection, in a cardigan embroidered with flowers, in a top that wrapped the body, in a print of interlocking moth wings, and particularly in the pale pink-and-blue color scheme.The preciousness of the clothes suggested an old-school couturier devoted to making his clients feel cherished. It's not an especially male idea, which loaned a subtle audacity to the collection. But then we've come to expect nothing less from this designer. And in that light, mention must be made of the stunning Escher-like origami effect on a blouson and jacket—McQueen may be an arch-provocateur, but he's also a master technician.
26 June 2006
Only Alexander McQueen could provide the astonishing feat of techno-magic that ended his show. Inside an empty glass pyramid, a mysterious puff of white smoke appeared from nowhere and spun in midair, slowly resolving itself into the moving, twisting shape of a woman enveloped in the billowing folds of a white dress. It was Kate Moss, her blonde hair and pale arms trailing in a dream-like apparition of fragility and beauty that danced for a few seconds, then shrank and dematerialized into the ether.This vision was in fact a state-of-the-art hologram—a piece by the video maker Baillie Walsh, art-directed by McQueen. The gown, a pale cascade of multiple organza ruffles, wasn't just an optical effect, though. It subsequently reappeared in the collection's victory line up, which wound its way around the glass box as the audience was still reverberating with wonder at witnessing this incredible event.The quality of the performance—and the extraordinary workmanship in the clothes that preceded it—was a timely reconfirmation of McQueen's unique powers as a showman-designer, and a far cry from the more straightforward presentations he¿s given the last few seasons. For this collection, he delved into his past, revisiting his Scottish family roots and refining the contents of the rampaging tartan "Highland Rape" show with which he began his career in London in the early nineties. Shorn of its original rawness and anger, the result was a poetic and technically accomplished tale that involved romantic images of Scottish fantasy heroines wandering glens and castle halls in vaguely Victorian tartan crinolines, bird-wing or antler-and-lace headdresses, feathered gowns, and pieces made from brocades that might have been dragged down from ancient wall-hangings.Some of McQueen's references—like the ones that influenced his sinuous black velvet dresses—appeared to be culled from pre-Raphaelite paintings of Lady Macbeth; others, like a fierce, bell-skirted warrior-woman plaid dress with lace armlets, seemed to owe more to punk. On the down-to-earth side, there was plenty of McQueen's sharp and salable tailoring on show, and some great coats, like a herringbone fur chesterfield. At the end, though, the ecstatic applause was primarily in honor of the experience—a memory that will go down as one of fashion's all-time highs.
2 March 2006
A preacher ranted apocalyptically on the soundtrack, Johnny Cash croakedPersonal Jesus, a blood-red moon hovered above the catwalk—the scene was set for another cinematic Alexander McQueen spectacle, this one a vision from hell, as he took care to point out in his accompanying notes. The presentation seemed (to this viewer at least) to depict the eventual transformation of healthy young men into the cadaverous undead, courtesy somewhere along the way of a bite from a very stylish vampire, a descendant perhaps of the Dracula that Gary Oldman portrayed some years ago. "Healthy" in McQueen's context meant healthily ambiguous—things kicked off with a parade of silk- or broderie-anglaise blouses, a fox fur draped over a languidly voluminous suit in a Prince of Wales check, trousers so high-waisted they would give Beau Brummel pause for thought. One droll touch was a Fair Isle sweater with skulls replacing the traditional pattern.A (not-so) gay zombie hussar signaled the arrival of a passage of more extreme ambiguities, such as a plaid kimono top with chrysanthemum appliqués that managed to be both punkish and effete. A sequence ofrobes de chambre—blood-red velvet, mustard-yellow silk, black-and-red satin—suggested Dracula at leisure in his library. Meanwhile, his handmaidens solemnly stalked the catwalk in the spectral form of ghoulish geishas.As for the man behind these visions? By comparison with the lost boys and girls who peopled his show, McQueen himself looked almost obscenely healthy as he took his bow in a chunky cable-knit sweater.
16 January 2006
Alexander McQueen has changed. The commanding impresario who once took delight in scaring and astonishing his audience with stadium-filling shows and designing at the brink of scandal has—if we're to judge by the past two seasons—joined the regular ranks of ready-to-wear designers who line up their models like soldiers and march 'em on out with the collection.What that leaves us with is a clear view of clothes. Black suits, to start with—and though you couldn't exactly call them straight, something's changed in the cut of their jib, too. For spring, McQueen's signature tailoring has lost its exaggerated waist and jutting shoulders, and been replaced by more-wearable spencers with buttoned-back lapels. Beneath, he shows short flippy skirts, shorts, or pants with black opaque tights. There's a faint girl-rocker air about them—and a cape with a silver-beaded phoenix on the back somewhere in there—but nothing to scare the horses.For night, the part of the show McQueen said was inspired by Greek goddesses, things took a turn for the disappointing—tiny pleated silver lamé dresses, white crystal-beaded gowns and pieces made in bandage wrappings of white or gold elastic. The slot formerly occupied by his showstopping extravaganzas is now serviced by metalwork body costumes with all the finesse of something left over from an eighties sci-fi TV series. Gone, even, are the staggeringly made, couture-grade fantasy gowns that have brought so many brides banging on his door. Though some of his moves are clearly being made in an effort to sell—no criticism in itself—this show, from a designer whose capabilities have won such respect, was a letdown.
6 October 2005
Alexander McQueen's conviction that there's romance in savagery found a perfect complement in the inspiration for his latest men's collection. William Golding'sLord of the Flies, the classic novel that spawned a forgettable Balthazar Getty movie, is a proto-Lost, weaving the tale of a group of schoolboys stranded on a desert island by a plane crash that kills the accompanying adults. Their descent from civilization to anarchy provided the framework for McQueen's spring show. Against a soundtrack of throbbing drums and a backdrop of draped parachutes, the designer opened with a group of expertly tailored "proper" clothes, all in white and just begging to be messed up.And after the initial emphasis on formality, as in a three-piece suit in cream linen, the mood steadily darkened. Hair got scruffier, clothes became less structured, more textured. A jacket-and-shorts set decorated with buttons suggested one of London's cockney Pearly Kings—or a castaway with too much time on his hands. A waistcoat and trousers trailing punky straps were poignantly printed with an old map. Then things fell apart, literally—washed leathers barely held together at the seams, a body stocking was split down its side. The escalating eccentricity encompassed a jumpsuit with trailing fringes, one cape of huge leaves made of leather, another of black coq feathers. A weathered black frock suit was an inverted mirror of the pristine white example that opened the show. There's no disputing McQueen's sense of drama—or romance, for that matter. However, this may be one instance when they combined to overwhelm coherence.
27 June 2005
Tippi Hedren and Marilyn Monroe. Biker molls and sweater girls. You got it: Alexander McQueen went to the sixties, all the way, for fall. With its filched movie and rock 'n' roll themes, the collection read as a knowing vehicle, a McQueen director's cut. Glacially restrained tailoring, early rocker chic, the classic Hollywood ball gown moment: He had 'em all. Plus great hair, great music, and a roar of old-school glamour.But there's no such thing as a McQueen routine without a sinister psychological subtext or two. Was there a hint in the invitation—a pastiche of the film poster forVertigo, superimposed with the title of another Hitchcock movie,The Man Who Knew Too Much? What McQueen knows shows aplenty. His combined knowledge of Savile Row tailoring and Parisian couture means he can scissor an impeccably narrow gray tweed coat or a nipped-waist pencil skirtsuit, and put sizzle into period sobriety. The same goes for his showstopper Charles James-meets-Marilyn evening gowns, with their strapless sculpted fishtails and "Happy birthday, Mr. President" spangles.But there's an underlying strain in all this knowingness, too. At a time when fashion demands commercial reality, theatrics alone can't carry a show. McQueen, perhaps with a weary sense of show 'em what they want, also put out a lot (Navajo blankets, tasseled suede circaThe Misfits), which turned parts of the presentation into a merchandise run-through of dubious taste. A cynical trotting out of an overextended theme isn't what the fashion world expects of Alexander McQueen. We know; he knows: He's bigger than that. So was that why, to the sounds of Elvis echoing through the hall, he left the building without comment?
3 March 2005
According to the program notes, Alexander McQueen's fall collection was inspired by the very different gangs featured in two French films from the nineties: the disenfranchised suburban Parisians of 1995'sLa Haine,and the sixteenth-century Catholic thugs of 1993'sLa Reine Margot.If what actually appeared on the catwalk had only the slenderest connection to either of these stated influences, there were certainly plenty of other gang references to be going on with. The first outfit—a hooded gray leather jacket and baggy gray pants—looked like Crips couture. A hooded leather coat with a pattern like an exploded soccer ball was a reminder of the tribalism of Europe's soccer terraces. An ensemble of black leather jacket and pants tucked into high boots suggested a modern-day droog. And the crown of silver thorns that topped a silver leather suit invoked the original gang leader Himself.The mix of butch and femme was classic McQueen: picture a densely sequined hoodie, or a delicate beaded black tulle T-shirt under a pair of dungarees, or a white leather trench topping a toile de Jouy top. A more straightforward proposition was the frock coat, which he has made his own. It appeared in teal wool, silver satin, and burgundy velvet, all with matching pants. But it's scarcely straightforwardness we expect—or want—from one of this designer's shows. The head of the last model out was wrapped like that of a medieval knight, in a cobweb of black beading. Only McQueen can leave an audience with such an image.
18 January 2005
“It was a lot of McQueen, all in one big collection.” Thus spake the designer after a performance that came across as a positioning statement—in more ways than one. The presentation summed up all his experience in sharp tailoring, spectacular romantic dresses, couture richness, and downright showmanship. And, with every look laid out on a giant chessboard, it couldn’t help but suggest a metaphor for the workings of the fashion industry.The chess device allowed McQueen to redo all his greatest moments, but in a prettier, lighter, more accessible way. He used the 1975 filmPicnic at Hanging Rockto work a girlish Edwardian theme, starting with tiny sailor jackets, school blazers, ticking-striped shirts, and gray knee-length shorts, then adding lovely white lace blouses and dresses. From there, it was onto the eighteenth century, in the form of precious flower-embroidered jackets over candy-striped puffball skirts, and dreamy floral chiffon dresses floating from Empire bodices.By the time the 36 models had taken up their positions, reminders of all McQueen’s past signatures and silhouettes were in place: the Savile Row-sharp tail coats; richly embroidered Japanese kimonos; streamlined sci-fi bodysuits; rigid molded corsets; and stiff, flounced godet skirts. En masse, it was very impressive. And even if this comprehensive résumé didn’t move his game along, most of the ideas had benefited from the designer’s revisions. They looked even better second time around: more feminine, less aggressive, and much more desirable. Checkmate!
7 October 2004
In the current climate, pairing "desert" and "army" would seemingly lead to one inescapable conclusion. But the crop-haired soldiers Alexander McQueen sent down his spring runway were more World War II desert fox than twenty-first-century jarhead. Maybe that's not so unexpected—there's always more romance in the past, and McQueen is one of fashion's most romantic designers. So his patchwork camouflage shorts appeared over a henna-tattooed body stocking, and he put a poncho cut from camouflage netting over sequined leggings.McQueen's use of color was startling—into a landscape of army green and sand tones, he threw sudden shocks of acid yellow or hot pink. (One of his stunningly bright silk jumpsuits came complete with matching gas mask). He even summoned a genie, his face and body dyed blue, in an incongruous—if perfectly cut—brown suit. But the dramatics couldn't overshadow the true power of McQueen's tailored pieces. What he's mastered with his menswear is an easy, instinctive sensuality that is often missing from his women's collections.
27 June 2004
It's only understandable that if the man who's been at the eye of the whirlwind of negotiations about taking up the reins at Yves Saint Laurent might have been thrown into an emotional spin. As we now know, Alexander McQueen turned down the offer, saying that it was far more important for him to concentrate on his own label. But although his fundamental instincts may be sound, the pain, strain, and self-questioning of recent weeks showed in this collection.McQueen's intention, he said, was to strip away "all theatrics and focus purely on design." In one way, his declaration is right on: Fashion, hedged about with so much overcomplicated stuff, does feel in want of a good, rigorous cleansing. Perhaps that's why the show looked like a strange kind of rebirthing. His first model, in flesh-pale slippery jersey from top to toe, looked like an embryonic alien being, stepping with horrible vulnerability from a spacecraft onto a kind of landing pad. She led out a parade of similarly nude-colored outfits in tweed, double-faced cashmere, leather, jersey, and chiffon, in which McQueen seemed to be trying to summarize the essence of his design identity. He pared it down to some of his familiar shapes—jumpsuits, molded hourglass coats, nipped-waist suits—all shorn of the elaborate fabrics and embroideries of past seasons. The best of his coats was an ivory swing-skirted shearling, one of the most believably commercial items in the collection.Yet, throughout there was a sense that the audience was waiting for the moment when this sci-fi-accented show would take off in the usual, thrilling, turbo-charged McQueen manner. A couple of frosted Mongolian-lamb hooded jackets almost did it, but then the mood subsided again into evening, where the long jersey draped dresses looked as if they might have been designed in a mood when McQueen's mind really had been turned toward Saint Laurent.It was a pity—if only human—that the collection didn't quite live up to expectations at such a crucial time for McQueen. But then again, this is fashion. There's always next season.
4 March 2004
It takes a showman like Alexander McQueen to get the lifeblood pumping back into fashion performance. His show—staged in the Salle Wagram, a nineteenth-century Parisian dance hall—was an exuberantly hilarious reenactment of Sydney Pollack’s Depression-era filmThey Shoot Horses, Don't They?Choreographed by Michael Clark over two weeks of intensive rehearsals in London, the narrative involved dancers, models, and audience in a visceral celebration of exquisitely glamorous clothes.In the opening scene, the girls entered—dancing for all they were worth on the arms of muscle-bound sailors and hunky hopefuls—dressed in fishtailed silver lamé, figure-hugging cha-cha dresses, and show-stopping gowns with spangled bodices and huge feathered skirts. Other competitors whirled on wearing pink corseted tulle tutus over gray ballet sweats; mint satin tap-suits; or a slinky confection of gray checkerboard chiffon. A Billie Holiday look-alike, dramatically vamping in pink charmeuse and ostrich, vied for attention as flashy bodysuited showgirls were energetically twirled aloft by their partners.McQueen’s signatures—elaborately pieced tailoring (now beautifully softened with delicate inserts of lingerie) and body-hugging denims spliced onto nude tulle—also did star turns. The pace picked up even further in the elimination race, in which morphed-together fluorescent chiffons and sports pieces ran hell-for-leather (on impossibly high heels) in a hotly contested dash around the room.There was even an opening for daywear. Blue-collar marathon survivors staggered out wearing plaid shirts, coats, and skirts made from quilts and recycled patchworks of shirting material, all crafted to the McQueen sex-bomb template. The show reached its climax as a lone exhausted dancer in a silver sequined gown mock-expired center stage. As she was carried off by the designer and his choreographer, thunderous applause rocked the hall.
9 October 2003
A glass wind-tunnel corridor bridging a snow-covered wasteland: that was the bleak techno-meets-nature setting for Alexander McQueen’s mind trip for fall. “I wanted it to be like a nomadic journey across the tundra,” he said. “A big, desolate space, so that nothing would distract from the work.”The clothes, sculpted into his signature nip-waisted, stiff A-line skirt silhouettes, exhibited all the intense craft and some of the shapes that he learned during his stint at Givenchy couture. It bumped his ready-to-wear up to a new level, and if the plot—which traveled through Eurasian ethnic into punk and on to motocross—wasn’t all that understandable, the decorative impact made up for it.Fantastic details were lavished on dramatic structured carapaces, embroidered, painted and mind-blowingly embellished to look like antique samurai armor, Russian lacquered dolls and tribal ceremonial dress. Somewhere along the line, the stiff pleated skirts segued into molded suits, done in jigsaws of two-tone checkerboard—the better to show off the designer’s devilishly accurate cutting skills.McQueen can’t resist some theatrics: he sent two models into the wind tunnel, one wearing a skintight leather suit harnessed to a billowing parachute, the other dragging a 20-foot kimono into the eye of the fake snowstorm. Still, the moments that made the audience catch its breath were those that betrayed McQueen’s softer, more romantic side. One was a jacket constructed of white tulle pom-poms that looked like a bubble of snowballs. The other was the prettiest dress in the show: pale gray chiffon cut in an empire shape, embroidered with sequins and worn by Natalia Vodianova with the brightest red ruched over-the-knee boots.
7 March 2003
Alexander McQueen, showman, bad boy, where are you now? After joining Gucci Group and losing 30 pounds, the designer has shed his famously macabre show tactics. The most shocking things about his summer presentation were its stripped-down, old-fashioned romance and solid commercial appeal.Against a giant screen projection of underwater scenes andBlair Witch–style haunted woods, McQueen unfolded a sartorial narrative that began with pirates and drowned maidens and ended in the rainforest. The odd journey took in brown leather corset vests and minis, worn with creamy chiffon ruffles, drapey knicker-length shorts, and Elizabethan doublets and ruffs. After a diversion into a largely redundant black sequence, McQueen burst out with prints and colors, and some major showstoppers in the form of floaty dresses in vibrant tie-dyes and jumpsuits in lime and electric blue. His crescendo was a rainbow-colored floor-sweeping gown with tulle ruffles and some spectacular boleros made of what looked like bird-of-paradise feathers.
4 October 2002
Casting away all but one of his usual theatrical props, Alexander McQueen proved to Paris that his design can stand on its own dramatically erotic strengths. Showing in the shadowy medieval vaulted hall of the Conciergerie, McQueen couldn’t resist a lone, macabre trick—a vista of a pack of caged wolves, and the opening image of a lone figure clad in a purple leather cape leading a pair of dogs (who looked more scared than scary). But that was just for old times’ sake. When his models stalked out in brown tweed, tailored to within an inch of their lives, and strapped into variations on brown leather braces, it was clear McQueen was concentrating on clothes and not theatrics.His vixenish women had tiny-waisted silhouettes done with amazing attention to cut and detail. Milkmaid necklines—far from innocent-were pushed up by leather bodices that curved down into the tightest pencil skirts, and finished off with thigh-high leather boots. McQueen moved from that Helmut Newton-esque fantasy to another—bad schoolgirls, who mixed lingerie and silver lamé ties and skirts in with their proper blazers and duffels. For a splendid finale, he brought out romantic flouncy skirts, an exaggerated puff sleeved black velvet coat and a skirt made of swags of jet beading. Best of all, he's softened his sometimes severe hand so that the idea of wearing these pieces seems not just possible, but quite appealing.A trim McQueen took his bow in a bespoke suit made by the Savile Row tailors, Huntsman. It seemed like a coming of age. “I wanted it to be romantic, beautiful,” he said. “Power to the women! I got fit for this and I worked hard for it.”
8 March 2002
"The Dance of the Twisted Bull" was the title of Alexander McQueen's highly anticipated collection, his first since partnering with Gucci Group and deciding to show in Paris.McQueen pulled off a bravura, Latin-themed romp. One particularly theatrical dress came equipped withbanderillas—the long spears with which bullfighters pique bulls—that seemed to impale the wearer in order to support a long ruffled train in the back. Another, a severely deconstructed blood-red señorita dress, had part of a jacket attached at the waist, while a matador-inspired strapless gown featured a built-in sword. An assortment of polka-dotted frocks were layered over matching stockings, and cinched with corsetlike straps and holster-inspired tops.Alongside these dramatic statements came plenty of carefully tailored, eminently wearable clothes, deftly proving McQueen's ability to mix iconoclastic statements with commercially viable product. Razored jackets were softened via seashell-like pleated skirts with gently upturned fronts; flared-sleeve eyelet shirts, layered skirts, and embroidered white jeans all looked confident, as did the cut-out dresses and sharp-as-a-tack toreador suits.
5 October 2001
Colorful lights, a merry-go-round, the sound of children? Alexander McQueen's mise-en-scène brought to mind family trips, fun and games, and maybe a couple of lighthearted mimes.But once the lights went down and the blaring soundtrack began, it became perfectly clear that there was nothing even remotely candy-coated about his lascivious carnival crashers. Cavorting and gyrating around poles, a posse of hard-as-nails girls took over the stage wearing shiny patent-leather jackets and jeans, scalloped coats and skirts, S&M overcoats, skintight leather pants and ornate military jackets that would've put Napoleon to shame. A nearly naked princess turned up in little more than a feathered headdress, a net gown and a few chains; her cohorts wore frayed sweaters with giant skulls and bones, and long suit jackets that became dresses as they wrapped around the body and then draped at the side.When the frantic pace finally slowed down, it was to reveal an eerie backdrop of gigantic stuffed animals, discarded dolls, puppets, balloons and ragged circus paraphernalia, out of which several macabre characters emerged, wearing massive ruffles, centuries-old suits and beat-up lace. The perfect accessory? One of McQueen's otherworldly creatures dragged around a golden skeleton with her foot.
20 February 2001
Alexander McQueen's show was nothing short of monumental. The audience sat around a mirrored cube, which, when lit from inside, revealed itself to be a mental-hospital holding cell. Demented girls, wearing hospital headbands and everything from extraordinary mussel-shell skirts to impossibly chic pearl-colored cocktail dresses, slithered and strutted while uselessly attempting to fly over the cuckoo's nest.McQueen was at his very best: There were gothic, theatrical pieces, like a dress with a miniature castle and rat posing as a shoulder pad; a top made out of a jigsaw puzzle; and a huge feathered creation with stuffed eagles suspended over the model's head, poised to attack à la Hitchcock. But amidst all the insanity, there was a cornucopia of startlingly elegant—and wearable—pantsuits, flouncy party dresses, and even a spectator pump or two.How to top off such a climactic presentation? After everyone thought it was all over, another cube within the psychiatric ward-cum-runway opened up to reveal a portly nude woman, her face covered by a mask, breathing through a tube, surrounded by fluttering moths. It was a truly shocking and enthralling tableau: Francis Bacon via Leigh Bowery and Lucien Freud. In a word, sublime.
25 September 2000
Björk took a fancy to, and was photographed in, a dramatic, deconstructed acid-wash denim hoop dress from this collection. Named for Eshu, the Yoruba spirit, the show paired African influences (neck rings) with Victoriana (leg-of-mutton sleeves) to dramatic effect.
3 October 2015
With cheeky insoucianceAlexander McQueendropped trou at the end of his Spring 2000 show to reveal his stars and stripes boxers. Eye was shown in New York, on a pier on the West side, and, once again, the models sloshed through water. They wore clothes that drew from active sportswear, bondage, and the Middle East;Gisele, for one, wore a tasseled and embroidered head covering with a metal-pailleted bodysuit. There was no ignoring the collection’s latent aggression when spikes rose through the water. Over those frightening points soared acrobats in burka-like shrouds, some striped red, others colored black, like good and bad angels.
3 October 2015
It wasn’t a fashion show. It was performance art. The models at__Alexander McQueen’__sSpring 1999 outing navigated two robotic contraptions in clothes that felt decidedly lighter and more sensual than his previous work, albeit every bit as fetishistic. Only whenShalom Harlowemerged in a strapless broderie anglaise dress cinched across the bust with a leather belt did the robots come to life. As she spun around on a circular platform, the robots, which were typically used to paint cars, sprayed her in a carefully choreographed dance. When it was over, Harlow practically stumbled into the audience. Potent stuff.
1 September 1998
Despite the fact that it was inspired byThe Shining, The Overlook was one ofAlexander McQueen’s most poetic collections. Presented inside a Lucite box, that imitated a Victorian-themed snow globe, this wintry fantasy featured ice skaters, gorgeous chunky handknits, and warm shearlings in a birch forest. As always, there was virtuoso tailoring; this show also featured intricate patchworked pieces. A laser-cut silver metal skirt and a silver metal corset wowed with their craftsmanship.
3 October 2015
Havingexplored the element of water,Alexander McQueenmoved onto fire, closing his Fall ’98 show with a model trapped in a ring of flames. Dubbing the show Joan, in reference to the Catholic martyr, the designer made use of metal mesh; and he layered tragedy on top of tragedy, printing the portraits of the Romanov children on dresses and tops. Adding to the drama was the hair, or lack of it, and the red contact lenses. A hint of salvation was offered by Diana Ross, whose words “You’re gonna make it, you’re gonna make it,” were played at the fiery finale.
3 October 2015
While there was plenty of pain inAlexander McQueen’s work, there was usually pleasure, and often some poetry as well. Such was the case with spring 1998’s Golden Shower show, renamed Untitled when the sponsors balked at the lasciviousness of the former title. Models walked down a runway made of water-filled Lucite tanks wearing tight snakeskin dresses and tailored intarsia suits. They were dressed in all white for the finale and were treated to a shower that made their mascara run and their all-white clothes see-through.
3 October 2015
Models stormed the runway like feral beasts atAlexander McQueen’s Fall 1997 show, which referenced H.G. Wells’s novel,The Island of Dr. Moreau, about a vivisectionist who creates humanoids out of animals. Topolino turned hair into manes, and used makeup to give a glowering feline aspect to models dressed in leather, acid-washed denim, and animal skins.
3 October 2015
Alexander McQueenput on a series of landmark shows in the late nineties, each one more extreme than the next. But for sheer provocation, nothing topped spring 1997’s La Poupée, or The Doll. Inspired by the artist Hans Bellmer, who fetishistically rearranged toy dolls, McQueen experimented with proportion and, more disturbingly, trussed the models in various metal restraints. His palKate Mosstook to the watery runway in a pair of his derriere-exposing bumster pants, the point of which, McQueen insisted, wasn’t to titillate. Rather, he said, “I wanted to elongate the body, not just show the bum. To me, that part of the body—not so much the buttocks, but the bottom of the spine—that’s the most erotic part of anyone’s body, man or woman.”
18 September 1996
Dante was shown in a candle-lit church in Spitalfields, London with a skeleton seated front row. Beauty and blasphemy were woven throughout this wide-ranging collection in whichAlexander McQueenexperimented with denim and Victoriana, tropes that he would return to again and again.
3 October 2015
Two seasons after showing hisBirds collection,Alexander McQueen’s models were flipping them to the audience at his Hunger show, which referenced the erotic vampire movie of the same name. The designer added bondage straps to some of the looks, and made liberal use of a blood red color. Among the more outre elements of the show were the models in casts, and the see-through, worm-filled bustier.
3 October 2015
Though avian prints appeared in this show—on the likes of VoguettePlum Sykesand the waist-training corsetiere Mr. Pearl—its title paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller about violent bird attacks. Throughout his careerAlexander McQueenwould be drawn, like a magnet, to the theme of destruction, present in this collection in the tire tread print, and, structurally in the tailored deconstruction that became his signature.
3 October 2015