Britain’s most numerous metaphorical bloom is the shrinking violet: A well-reported story here this week asserted that 47% of Britons identify as shy and 10% as very shy. Just in time, then, for Sarah Burton and her talented team at Alexander McQueen to arrange a highly potent wearable botanical remedy for wallflowers everywhere.
For how could you not feel wreathed in confidence wearing a free-moving dress whose rib-knit body grows into a vivid, shaggy eruption of taffeta strips in magenta or crimson? Or a similarly conceived orange tweed-topped coat that mutates into two lower levels of taffeta? Or an incredible corseted dress edged with hypersized petals of curved and pleated strips of magenta-tinged taffeta?
Many of the floral illustrations in print or embroidered in stitch and pin on satin evening dresses and tailoring were drawn from life in the enormous 19th-century glasshouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. The subjects of these drawings were specifically flowers in danger of extinction. Others were based on flowers that are already extinct but which the McQueen team was able to observe dead, pressed, and desiccated in the Kew herbarium.
This complemented Burton’s ongoing focus on (and radical refiguring of) British tailoring heritage, as well as her championing of sustainable practice and conservation. (All those aforementioned crocheted taffeta strips, for instance, were sourced from stock bolts of fabric.) There were also nods to long-term McQueen tropes, including the whipstitch detailing on the plentiful harvest of badass lace-lined, godet-paneled leather pieces. Militaria returned in a hybrid biker-and-dress-uniform jacket that contrasted olive drab with magenta and came with grosgrain-effect piping upon which was printed a new house emblem that looks like a walnut crossed with a scarab and that incorporates the letters AMQ.
Elsewhere were some uniform pieces for more day-to-day displays of McQueen militancy and two new handbags, one named the Story and the other the Tall Story. The real narrative here, though, centered on Burton’s botanically weaponized ready-to-wear: the perfect armor for any shrinking violet set on blossoming into a tall poppy totally immune to pruning.
