![]() ![]() Read more: What WFH Looks Like For An Alexander McQueen Couturier McQueen’s shock tactics weren’t always a hit with his sponsors. For Dante in 1996, a skeleton was seated front row, while the 1997 show It’s a Jungle Out There saw a car catching fire, albeit accidentally. It set the tone for the shows that followed: Taxi Driver paid homage to Martin Scorsese’s troubled protagonist Travis Bickle Highland Rape was a commentary on England’s violation of Scotland and The Hunger showcased transparent bustiers filled with worms. His 1992 graduate collection, entitled Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, included a coat printed with thorns and locks of McQueen’s own hair sewn into the garments. The recipient of four British Designer of the Year awards, as well as a CBE, and now heralded as a genius, it’s easy to forget that McQueen’s creations were divisive from the offset. Over the course of his 18-year career, the designer’s presentations for both his eponymous label and Givenchy, where he served as creative director from 1996 to 2001, were the stuff of legend: 10 minutes of pure theatre that enthralled audiences with their audacity and conceptual brilliance. Now, many of us long for the true emotional experience of seeing clothes like these on real bodies and real runways once again.Alexander McQueen was a visionary. Alongside a number of sustainable measures, that fact spoke to Burton’s reflections on a post-pandemic sensibility. ![]() For all their ballroom splendor, her garments never looked constricting. 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.Ī 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. 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. It was a big, blown-up anemone-adorned message that no virus gets in the way of this dressmaker’s desires.Įven 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. ![]() 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. She had crushed up photographs of anemones, photographed them again, and transferred the images onto gigot-sleeve poly faille gowns worthy of Empress Sisi. “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.” “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. 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. This is the kind of poetry and beauty that got her through the darkness of the past year. It was to convey the healing powers of nature that Sarah Burton chose anemones and water as recurring motifs in her Alexander McQueen collection.
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