On a sparkling October day in London, a drone was hovering over the splendid Greenwich Naval College, recording the goings-on in a transparent bubble that had landed in the middle of Sir Christopher Wren’s 17th century landmark. It seemed a symbolic irony that the mechanical eye-in-the-sky—a standard device these days for recording fashion spectacles—must have been surveilling the focus of Sarah Burton’s collection hundreds of feet below. The human eye.
“The eye is the most unique symbol of humanity—each one is like a fingerprint; each one is completely individual,” she said, explaining the enlarged prints and raffia-fringed images of irises, pupils, and eyelashes embedded in dresses and spilling over a trouser suit. That thought gave her the impetus to begin to grapple with layers of themes that the house of McQueen has always been concerned with: nature and technology, deep history and present fears.
“It’s sort of about seeing things again,” she said. “Not walking around with your eyes shut, your eyes down. Just seeing each other, recognizing each others’ humanity. Caring about each other.” But against that, she also meant that having open eyes on the world means taking on terrors. Burton recently re-read Orwell’s 1984. “That played into it as well: how do you find human contact in the world we live in, in the world of technology?”
And then, she’d taken a good look at Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in a book with zoomed-in detail of the artist’s ghastly imaginings in a setting surrounded by flowers and fountains. There were Bosch demons battling with angels in Alexander McQueen’s posthumous collection. Burton was asked why she returned to the reference, to adorn some sections of the collection in patterns and embroideries after Bosch. “It’s the times we’re living in now, she said. “It feels like almost like we’re in another Dark Ages in many ways. It’s something we’ve always looked at, at McQueen. Life, death, destruction, beauty. It’s all there. Maybe,” she reflected, “it’s what people do to each other actually. And then, the beauty right next to it. So there’s this strange juxtaposition of humanity behaving in one way, and nature in another.”
But we’re getting away from how her collection looked. Besides the decorative narratives, out came clean, sharp tailoring. Look two: a revival of McQueen’s bumsters, with a cropped tuxedo jacket cut into sharp points at the front and the rest of it balanced to swing at the back. There are generations that have never heard of bumsters—Alexander McQueen invented that explosive downward shift of pant design in the 1990s. But the red-hot relevance of torso-exposure, and clothes designed to expose slices of naked flesh needs no explanation to new eyes.
“It’s how would you adjust the proportion of a woman's body? I feel like it’s always about a woman dressing for a woman,” she added. “ So it’s not a male gaze. I wanted to sort of embrace the female form; to sort of slice away in a very kind of dissected way.”
She pursued that idea through different tactics, in swooped-fronted tailored jumpsuits, knitted dresses fashioned in tiered strips leaving open slices of negative space, and in half-open panels aerating romantic full-skirted evening dresses at the finale.
The references to the touchstones of the work of her late boss felt timely in this collection. Sarah Burton is designing in a different world, but the themes she brought to bear, and the skills inherent in the house resonate more than ever today.
