Last month, on a runway of flagstones and 17th-century grave markers, Alexander McQueen returned to London. Not the late designer himself, but his namesake house, showing at London Fashion Week for the first time in 25 years.
The firm’s creative director, Seán McGirr, had decided that after a quarter century of showing in Paris, it was time to return home. In the shadowy gothic undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, the team attempted to summon McQueen’s visceral darkness, with mixed results. A few weeks later, luxury group Kering, which owns the brand, announced McGirr’s forthcoming departure.
After McQueen’s death, his protégé, Sarah Burton, inherited his mantle. Burton helmed the house with vigor after his death, blending her mentor’s edge with light femininity to bewitching effect for 13 years. This silk and laser-cut leather dress from her Spring 2012 collection, offered on 1stDibs by Realms Vintage, displays her penchant for the macabre. Equal parts beautiful and ominous, it sends shivers down your spine.
The dress’s foundation is familiar: a nude silk lining and a delicate mesh embroidered with a pattern akin to Chantilly lace. This features scrolling vines and, importantly, stylized roses, a motif that McQueen used throughout his career. He loved history, and the rose has great historical significance in British visual culture. It also serves as a paradoxical symbol, combining the alluring beauty of soft petals with the danger of thorns — a dichotomy perfectly in tune with McQueen’s dark humor and philosophy.
This contradiction is furthered, in several ways, by the appliqué overlaid on the silk foundation. Made from thin pieces of leather, it glides over the soft mesh with malicious ease, its glossy black presenting about as striking a color contrast with the silk’s soft blush as is possible. Then, there’s the divergence in motifs. The leather is laser-cut to mimic lace, but the edges are barbed, the rose’s flower supplanted by its thorns and threatening leaves that poison the peaceful surface beneath it.
Angular, symmetrical tendrils climb up the body to create an ornate central column that mimics vertebrae, reflecting Burton’s interest in Renaissance anatomical studies showing the flayed musculature of the hips, ribs and chest. On the runway, the dress was paired with a matching lace hood. Whether by chilling coincidence or design, from a distance, the model appears to be engulfed in a swarm of bats.
Lately, the fashion world has been obsessed with death — or at least dead designers. Competition for designer vintage has never been fiercer, and retrospectives of past trailblazers are now standard museum programming. Makeup artist Alexis Stone even reincarnated as the late Manfred Thierry Mugler at the latter’s eponymous brand’s presentation last month via shockingly realistic prosthetics. But no fashion rebirth is as longed for as McQueen’s. Sixteen years after the messianic designer’ death, devotees still mourn him, pining for his twisted drama, which his brand now struggles to evoke.
Burton’s oeuvre for the house, however, is a treasure trove — or perhaps a particularly ornate crypt — full of thrilling fashion. She worked alongside McQueen from 1996 until he died, in 2010, carrying on his complex vision afterwards with grace. Her laser-cut lace dress displays all the hallmarks of the constant battle between beauty and malevolence that made McQueen’s work so scintillating. Its anatomical structure and vampiric decoration are morbid, yes, but unmistakably elegant. Of all the skeletons someone could have in their closet, this one deserves to come out and play.
