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, backbone is 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.
