During her parlay with Sarah Mower for Vogue’s Forces of Fashion summit last month, Sarah Burton spoke about the inherently democratic process of the house. This began at the shared cutting table McQueen and his team used when she first joined, and ran through to the exhibition and workspace—open to all—recently established in the attic of the brand’s Bond Street store. “There is no hierarchy of ideas. It’s a really collaborative process,” Burton said.
As in McQueen’s most-recent resort collection, this closely connected menswear offering expressed that community philosophy most explicitly through the reuse of its design team’s sketches as a print, in this case on look 31’s Fred Astaire tailcoat meets Phil Daniels fishtail parka. Also as in that womenswear—as well as in the flinty black accents that punctuated the cliff-face backdrop of this shoot—these were pieces whose surface exposed the geology of the thinking and provenance behind them.
Pleasingly excavatable examples included jackets hybridized to combine black biker facades within scarlet jersey bomber construction, cricket sweaters whose mysterious black ooze would never be tolerated on the field of play, and a double-breasted jacket whose traditional ticket pockets survived the transfer to black leather. Dip-dyed dégradé color divisions, bold ribbon details, and layered, opaque “skeleton” prints were also carried over from resort to menswear. Worn against a distorted Breton stripe sweater and white shorts, a sportily informal logo-strap canvas gym bag was probably the clearest point of separation between the two here: Otherwise, Burton and McQueen’s both-gender exercise in democratic was kept in strict alignment. This value carried through to the substance of a collection that—again, just like its seasonal sister—was predominantly made of upcycled overstock fabrics.
