This Alexander McQueen collection contained so many brushstrokes of nuance and reference that you were left itching to hear the design rationale behind them unstitched. Sarah Burton’s team is well-prepped, welcoming, and good eggs in general, yet seeing a collection as rich as this without that creator’s take seems like listening to a song with great lyrics played instrumentally. The sparse release notes asserted a “focus on silhouette,” and once you got beyond top notes including the sweetly naif early abstract-aping papercut prints and nicely spliced hybrid garments that also featured heavily in women’s pre-fall, it was these experiments in outline that lingered most in the memory.
Typical to the house was tailoring that blended the ceremonial with the severe and was resistant to timestamping: a pair of gray flannels that featured double pleating and a sculpturally cut inhalation south of the knee was a pant especially worth panting for. Just as those hybrid garments more readably conjoined conventionally siloed forms of menswear—tailoring and denim, and so on— so this collection appeared more loosely to collide periods of menswear. Interplaying currents in the informal wear saw a relatively classic bomber teamed with straight-leg high-rise denim and styled in a medley of Kamen-esque Buffalo and rockabilly, and beyond both of them Ivy League. High-waisted but cinched at the ankle submariner pants worn against pec-promoting knits evoked a slightly Puritan redux of the piratical post-punk London New Romanticism that my colleague Laird Borrelli-Persson has been excavating so interestingly of late: Sort of Adam Ant meets Captain Sensible, but much more sensible.
The components of these finally drawn collages included many straightforwardly seductive garments, including bicolor intarsia Aran-esque knits and an outrageously cool bomber cape coat in black silk satin with a cinched waist and those print reliefs in metal embroidery that was total frontman material. Even unsung, this collection’s melodic plays on shape and association beguiled.
