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.
