Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen:
Spring-Summer 2012-13.
October 4, 2011.
Paris.
After the media frenzy creative director of Alexander McQueen Sarah Burton had to incur over the past year - the microcosmic industry scrutiny seen at her initial appointment coupled with the high profile exposure garnered for creating the Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding gown, it was time for Burton’s work to laterally shift into something, dare we say, more Lee-forward.
Story-book references and the whimsical imagery that follows is and never will be my cup of tea - the McQueen label I know and grew up with was a two-tiered exercise in design; abrasive, often downright hostile articulations of images suspended in the mind of a very troubled, though genuinely brilliant hooligan AND the demi-saccharin sensibilities of the same tortured soul - the collections (I’m guessing anywhere from 2003-up until his diffusion line with H&M) where Lee’s acquired tome of work and the thoughts that propelled their creation triumphed in more commercial arenas. But alas, McQueen has past on and his ghost (for a transient period over this past summer at least) wafted the hallways of the MET’s ‘Savage Beauty’ exhibit - a retrospective downloaded archives of past works, amalgamated, annoyingly so, into a four-room viewing space. After jumping the evil LVMH ship in 2002 and translating appropriately into areas of comfort at Gucci Group, Lee’s work, he told Jeanne Beker in a 2007 candid interview with Fashion-Television, ‘got good.’ In a collection entitled ‘Irere’ for Spring-Summer 2003, Lee invited on-lookers into his mind - particularly his love affair with the ocean and scuba-diving, and produced a show behind a mega-screen depicting a storybook prince being cast overboard and being saved by a model wearing the now-infamous oyster dress. While the image was beautiful and poetic, what would follow at the ‘Irere’ experience was seemingly devilish and peripatetic - the sado-leather and the black-spiked millinery where models were projected onto the same screen in night-vision perspective while an equally as subversive rendition of ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ rattled our cages. Beauty for Lee was always packaged pessimistically and oftentimes communicated in sorrow.
So while Fall-Winter 2011-12 took us back to the Fall-Winter 2002 stomping ground of La Concierge, where Lee depicted the martyrdom of droogs, revolutionaries, and their ghosts - Burton reminded us of Lee’s own love affair with the natural world, something that she adamantly communicated last year at her Spring-Summer 2011 showing. What’s admirable about Burton is that she is not transducing the same storyline already explored at Spring-Summer 2003 or the aforementioned points of reference. The work is wholly her’s - but you cannot deny the genetic endowment of the house searing through the surface of the garments shown today. Dispersed arbitrarily throughout a ‘very-Lee’ collection were the exquisite tailleurs (in Chabas water color) - a nice adjunct, if you ask me, to the outre quotient of the collection provided by the inordinate amount of Rene Magritte-esque facial shrouds - a Lee favorite. The crimson one displayed on Siri Tollerod had me standing at the hellfire of Lee’s F/W 1998 ‘Joan’ and the transparent headpiece on Kasia Struss had me equally as sentimental for Lee’s F/W 1996 ‘Dante.’ The psychosocial and fervent (though probably not at the time....) high camp of those now-cultural-memories even wafted over this summer at Burton’s menswear collection for Spring-Summer 2012-13, where the Texas Chainsaw-esque steel drawbridge, standing conspicuously behind the exit ramp, served as show statement center piece.
[ the showspace for Spring-Summer 2012-13 via style.com ]
Burton is a consummate tailor regardless of the heavy volume of psycho-shock tactical discussion underneath this collection. A much needed inference of her work is that it neither contorts old worlds of the McQueen label nor rehashes them into channels where at any given moment an on-looker would deduce carbon-copying and the re-production of vanguard McQueen oeuvre. What Burton has now achieved is the intelligible prototyping of her own artifice, a feat that naysayers conjectured that she might be incapable of achieving during the time of her acclimation this time last year. As far as I’m concerned - Sarah is doing just fine and the past four collections since her debut (including a few uncomplicated resort showings) have shown her to be an artist of fine parasympathy. Communicatively clear and methodologically triumphant, this collection for next spring really re-engaes the viewer into a discussion that begs the question; what is pure creativity? Creativity and the level to which it is realized by a designer is a subjective mode - but not for the design-champion Burton. This is the McQueen of this era’s fashion landscape and hopefully the McQueen of the days to come. Welcome to oblivion.
- Matthew X. Callahan
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