“What do you talk about in a time when there’s so much noise?” queried Sarah Burton during final fittings on the eve of presenting Alexander McQueen fall. “I wanted this collection to be really grounded, bold, and heroic,” she answered herself. “I feel like you need to be heroic.”
Burton’s poetic adventure began with a visit to Wales, the storied Celtic land of myths and creativity. At St. Fagans National Museum of History in the capital city of Cardiff, the first thing that caught her eye was the Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt, fashioned at night over a 10-year period from 1842 by a tailor using recycled scraps of the woolen cloths he had used to craft the uniforms he made by day. With its scenes from the Bible and allusions to the Industrial Revolution that was threatening the very idea of handcraft at the time, it is a powerful object, “a narrative of someone’s life,” as Burton said. Taking her cue from this inspirational starting point, she worked on sharp-seamed, graphic tailoring that incorporated upcycled wool flannels from previous McQueen seasons woven in British mills and set in dramatic geometric blocks that suggested flags or heraldic pennants. The Victorian tailor’s startlingly contemporary imagery was reflected in prints and complex intarsia treatments.
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