“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 style They 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.
Traditional Welsh love spoons caught Burton’s eye too. Elaborately carved from a single piece of wood, these spoons were typically presented to the object of one’s affection, with motifs suggesting love and eternity that Burton worked into impasto guipure lace, stark white on sharply tailored black jackets, and even set dangling from a striking short evening dress of gleaming silver embroidery.
The famed Welsh blankets, meanwhile, represented for Burton the idea of “protection and wrapping and caring and kindness” that seems so yearned for in this uncertain age. The idea was powerfully suggested in a surprisingly tender 1930s photograph Burton had pinned to her inspiration board, depicting three Welsh miners in their formal Sunday-best suits, with their respective infant children held by blankets wrapped around them and improvised into papooses “so that they had their hands free to work,” as Burton pointed out.
The thoughtful collection opened with the sound of birdsong and echoing children’s voices and reverberated with the thud of sturdy boots or flashing knife-steel shoes against the stripped wooden floor. The McQueen warrior women marched relentlessly on, in sharply tailored frock coats and slim-leg pantsuits gripped by belts jangled with jewels that included tiny silver hip flasks and metal-bound notebooks; dresses that resembled leather blankets draped like tartan shawls over fitted cuirass bodices; and a finale of fairy-tale “bird’s nest” evening dresses of frothing net and embroidery suggestive of medieval folk tales: powerful romance.
