At the close of Sarah Burton’s “pared down” yet nonetheless monumental Spring 2020 collection for Alexander McQueen, the designer took her bow trailed by a seemingly endless procession of McQueen staffers. The members of the London Contemporary Orchestra kept playing the modern classical piece composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge (sister of Phoebe) for the show. The audience kept clapping and cheering. No one rushed out of the venue, even though it was late and dinner beckoned. Time took a breather, essentially.
And, wonderfully enough, this was the message Burton hoped to achieve with her offering this season. As she wrote in her voluminous show notes, “I love the idea of people having the time to make things together, the time to meet and talk together, the time to reconnect to the world.” In practice what this amounted to was that the entire McQueen staff—not just the studio but even the HR department—completely hand-embroidered two of the dresses shown on the catwalk. Inspired by a London group called the Stitch School, which teaches boys and girls needlework, the staff sat together and chain stitched and silk knotted over the line drawings of Central Saint Martins students, who had sketched on a single giant sheet during a life drawing class at the McQueen store in London. All of those students were credited in the show notes. Talk about community spirit!
And talk about a value-rich backstory. Here are a few things one needs to know about Burton’s 42 designs shown tonight. She upcycled lace, organza, and tulle from prior seasons. She recycled and reinvented old patterns from both her and Alexander McQueen’s history. She worked primarily with linen from Northern Ireland and linen made from flax grown at a particular female-owned farm—a farm that had until recently housed livestock. She created damasks with the sole remaining linen weaver in Ireland. She created lustrous, light-as-paper linens with the sole remaining beetler in Ireland (beetling is a process in which linen is covered in potato starch and then pounded on a wood machine for hours on end). She designed embroideries of vivid, blooming endangered flowers for a dress of silk faille and an ivory suit. As with her Fall 2019 offering, Burton cut her tailoring from British mohair sharkskin, a worsted wool from mills in the north of England. Local, repurposed, conscious, artisanal.
And spectacularly beautiful. This was by far the most exquisite collection of the season to date. Every piece was purposeful and important: a black evening suit with a slashed jacket to create a new spin on tails, with a lace-trimmed shirt elegantly spilling out; a simple day dress in black beetled linen with a pin-tucked bodice and exuberantly puffed sleeves; a tiny strapless frock in hand-pleated, hand-cut pale blue organza meant to resemble a flax flower; an ivory sweaterdress with a tiered skirt and sleeves knit so fine as to resemble tulle; a trench in raw linen and black wool with a flirtatious backside. There were looks that demanded a red carpet or a wedding day—an asymmetric explosion of lace and ruffles anchored by half of a tailored jacket—and others that demanded a smart office (the most powerful suits anywhere) or a very chic day (a patched, striped shirtdress with swaggering sleeves and a sleek bodice). There was a slashed knit frock in navy for a hot date, and a draped number in ivory crochet for an even hotter one.
This is the wardrobe of which dreams are made, and it arrived in a season sorely in need of such heady imaginings. But there was nothing insubstantial going on here. Sarah Burton has always made incredibly lovely clothes for the house of McQueen; she just has that very rare gift. But in the past few seasons, and tonight more than ever, she proved something far, far lovelier. When you make things with the right values, when you treat the earth and its citizens and their traditions with care and respect, when you endeavor to reimagine what might once have been tossed aside or away, when you take the time to truly care about every piece you create, you simply make better things. With great thought comes great beauty—magnificence, really. This was the lesson in sustainability that every corporate leader in fashion needed to be taught. Tonight they went to stitch school with Sarah Burton.
