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 fest American 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.
