Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen: Fall-Winter 2011-12.

Alexander McQueen:  Fall-Winter 2011-12

 

Newly appointed creative director Sarah Burton is, needless to say, fastidiously waging ahead—full speed, no questions asked.  Although it is early in her position as overseer of men’s and women’s ready-to-wear at the company, Burton has already heralded a few impeccably delivered collections that have enriched the vocabulary of the house since the devastatingly sudden passing of Lee McQueen last year.  In an interview with WWD one week before the debut of her S/S 2011 premiere, Burton stated that she is not capable of ever assuming the reality of Lee.  She went on to explain that her job was to factor in the namesake motifs of the brand and discontinue for the time being the high-theatrics and bravado that has become synonymous with a McQueen presentation.  But what would this agenda entail?
 

The McQueen image was to be stripped of the psychosocial camp and sub-textual references that were singlehandedly engineered by the masterful l’enfant terrible himself.  Gone are the days of electrocuting yashmak-clad models and dropping them into a murky, spike-filled pool.  No more rings of fire, haut bourgeois warriors, abrasive storylines, or challenging, campy show venues. Spring-Summer 2011 was a peaceful re-working of traditional concepts and shapes.  Though it achieved a soft reconfiguration of the brand’s image, it demonstrated above all else a cohesive furthering of where Lee had left off.  Not to mention it proved to be money in the bank as far as Gucci Group was concerned.  It made sense for the times and more importantly catered to the commercial needs of the McQueen consumer of today.

That is not to say that Burton’s creative direction has completely expelled the disquieting poetry and dramatics of her predecessor.  It appeared to me anyways that Fall-Winter 2011-12 marked a return to old territory, in particular the arena where Lee had presented his fetishistic, ghostly ready-to-wear during the Fall-Winter 2002 show season.  It was back to the gallows for the McQueen woman but for an entirely different end this time around.  Even though the collection was successful in transporting us nearly ten years back in time, when the McQueen woman menacingly traced around the forbiddingly eerie interiors of La Conciergeie on a rainy March night in Paris, it did not resurrect the purposeful medieval requiem of that show.  But you can’t say the silhouette wasn’t similar.  The clothes themselves even had the color palette (black, lilac, cream) and bondage context used by McQueen in that collection—Supercalifragilistic, as I recall.

  

If the McQueen woman was being accompanied by her hooded executioner in 2002 while conscientiously objecting against the systems prosecuting her, this show dealt with the aftermath of her haunting.  She is not a frightening apparition but an ethereal, elegiac representation of that woman.  Her supple hide is trimmed in a rigid stencil of leather, her ballooning tiers of ruffled tulle a protective second skin.  Her upper body is fixed in a deadbolt harness, her lower a train of fluttering, elegant fur.  Whether you like it or not, the ghost of Lee McQueen and his woman scorned are amongst the living.  She might be disengaged from the furious hell-fires of her past but she is walking silently among us, serenading onlookers with her gallant memory.  Thank you, Sarah.