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Alexander McQueen

Fall 2023 RTW

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Properties

Date: March 5, 2023
Location: Paris, France
Looks: 55
Brand: Alexander McQueen
URL: wwd.com

Critic Reviews

By Booth Moore for WWD

In a season when classic tailoring has been a major storyline, Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton blew everyone out of the water.

Returning to the Paris runway after a three-year absence, Burton proved she is the rare designer who can bring theatricality to suiting.

With a runway set that put the audience inside a zoetrope, projections of the clothes moving all around them, and the musical note soundtrack of the fall 1998 “Joan of Arc” collection playing in reverse, Burton returned to the roots and rigor of McQueen.

“Anatomy, anatomy of tailoring, anatomy of clothing…where he started on Savile Row, revisiting construction of garments then tearing it apart and subverting it and turning it upside on its head,” Burton said backstage of her process.

Wearing a black peaked corset jumpsuit, Naomi Campbell led the charge of bold-shouldered, precision-cut pinstripe suits, white shirts and ties on one of the most diverse casts of the season.

Here was the discipline and uniform-like appeal that’s been in the fashion conversation. But there was also an undercurrent of eroticism to the Helmut Newton-esque slicked back hair and gender play, and the provocative orchids, with petals placed just so on the body, as on a gorgeous black faille trenchcoat with dramatic sleeves, for example.

Blazers were sculpted into high-slit bustier dresses, lapels twisting around the neckline and flap pockets accenting the hips. Or they were turned upside down, contoured to the waist, with vents falling softly over the shoulders and slashed sleeves hanging, worn over long, lean trousers.

Men’s corsets and waist-nipping jackets, some with orchid prints or a shock of blood red embroidery, were equally sensual over pleated, ‘40s-feeling trousers.

The focus on the body led Burton to look at Leonardo da Vinci anatomy drawings, which translated into extraordinary dresses, one in a muscular-looking black knit, another crafted from skeletal-looking cream cables with built-out shoulders, waist cutouts and a unraveling skirt.

She achieved similar effect on gowns using crystals and bugle beads hugging the body, then dissolving to fringe skirts. The showstopper was in silver with an orchid-shaped bodice.

The evening tailoring was what looked really fresh, as classic as the concept is. It would be a real power move to rule next week’s Oscars events and red carpets in a tuxedo expertly slashed at the midriff and accessorized with an overgrown silver orchid necklace, or a slashed tuxedo jumpsuit with swaggering crystal epaulettes.

Why go back to sartorialism now, when COVID-19 made us feel like we might never see it again?

“It feels smart in the times we live in; you want to feel put together and strong against such chaos,” Burton said.

There’s security in that.

By Sarah Mower for Vogue

In a season where the return to valuing designers who can genuinely cut it has risen high on the fashion agenda, Sarah Burton proved again that the house of Alexander McQueen is up there with the very best. Back in Paris, she chose the apposite moment to remind people of the sharpness and excellence of the tailoring—for women and for men—and the expression of a darkly explosive imagination that is alive in the McQueen ateliers in London.

“It was looking at anatomy, the anatomy of tailoring,” she said backstage. “Almost back to the beginnings of McQueen on Savile Row. It was a progression, which starts very kind of straight and structured. And then it begins to flash and twist and turn upside down. It’s like how you begin with a garment—you have to know that there’s a way to construct it, the bones of it, before you can dissect it and subvert it.”

Naomi Campbell, in a black jumpsuit with a swooping corseted bustier, led out a march of impeccable black suits, white shirts and black ties, and pinstripes cut into jackets and morphing into tailored strapless dresses. Strictness and pulled-together uniform have been surfacing as a theme this season; here, there was a precision and controlled tension of kinkiness where nothing was quite what it seemed.

Burton partly put that down to having watched Cate Blanchett in Tar: “That part where you see the tailors making their chalk-marks on the cloth.” The broken lines she had woven into the pinstripes vibed on that process. Echoes of McQueen culture reverberated, literally in the circular space—the musical box sound of his ‘Joan of Arc’ collection of fall 1998, played backwards; a video take on the stop-motion Victorian photography of Eadweard Muybridge ran upside down on the encircling walls. “Because it feels like everything’s upside down in the world, I suppose,” Burton said with a shrug.

Her idea about dressing and studying the body led her to the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Once you knew that, the peeled-back sections of knitwear dresses, incised on the hips, took on a new, sinister context. Surreptitious references to blood and guts were transformed and sublimated into asymmetric frills and prints which looked like giant orchids at some points, and drawings of dissected cadavers at others.

Glints of fiery red and otherworldly silver lit up the eveningwear. At one moment, a shredded-hem black bugle-beaded dress looked almost like a reincarnation of Alexander McQueen’s ruby red Joan of Arc dress, in which his model had met her finale in a ring of fire on the London runway.

In calling up the past and reconnecting with the earliest days she’d worked with McQueen, Sarah Burton projected this collection right into the here and now. It had drama and strength, and many options for all genders to dress very differently than the over-blown theatrical costume that has passed for event-wear these past few years. It wouldn’t at all surprising if Cate Blanchett’s stylist is on the phone to McQueen’s headquarters tomorrow.