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.
