I hope it's Sarah Barton and her team at McQueen and this time the bride (or the Queen) let's her have a bit of rein.
It could be Ralph and Russo as they did the engagement dress. I love their detail and grandeur.
My favourite (but not the bookies) is, Alexander McQueen’s creative director, who has her indelible mark on poetic collections that draw on Britain’s history and craft heritage.
For those of you who are interested to know more, and why I love to know all about her.
Sarah Burton grew up in the no-nonsense North of England, one of five artistic children who was dressed, as she remembers, “in my brother’s hand-me-downs—hence the longing for beautiful clothes!”
That longing eventually took her to Saint Martins art school to study fashion print design. At the time, as Burton remembers, everyone was talking about the provocative talent of a recent graduate, Alexander McQueen, who was rapidly securing a reputation as a designer of iconoclastic brilliance. Burton’s tutor, Simon Ungless, was a friend of McQueen’s and, impressed by his student’s passion for research, suggested that she intern with him. “I was a bit scared,” the soft-spoken Burton admits, “because I wasn’t very ‘fashiony.’ But meeting him was completely mind-blowing: He was so lovely and very, very warm.”
She was also in awe of McQueen’s intuitive talent. On her first day in the designer’s disordered Hoxton Square studio, “he took some lace and pinned this beautiful dress on the stand in an hour, dancing around the mannequin,” Burton recalls. “It was like sculpture—I’ve never seen anything like it.” In those early years, McQueen made a lot of the pieces himself. “In such a short space of time he did everything,” Burton remembers. “Tailoring, eveningwear, dresses, embroidery, leather, knits—everything!”
As a result, McQueen’s team learned never to say no to a technical challenge—because they would often come into the studio in the morning to find a finished garment on the stand that McQueen had spent the night resolving himself. In the beginning, Burton admits that she “couldn’t really sew or pattern-cut—I had to learn really quickly,” and with money tight, there was no room for error because, as she says, “you couldn’t afford to remake it!” When the brand was acquired by François Pinault’s Gucci Group (now Kering) in 2000, and resources and production capabilities were exponentially amplified, Burton spent time in the new Italian factories teaching herself their specialist skills. She realized that if she showed “that you can get your hands dirty,” the craftspeople in turn could achieve results that often exceeded her expectations.
After the brilliant, troubled McQueen took his life in 2010, Burton, by then the designer’s invaluable right-hand collaborator for fourteen years, was his natural successor—most immediately, she was responsible for finishing the Angels and Demons collection that McQueen had begun but had been unable to complete. After that solemn, elegiac presentation, Burton finally emerged from behind the scenes, though the transition into the spotlight for this modest, self-effacing woman was clearly not an easy one. “I was always in the chorus—I was never a soloist,” she explains. But she did a reverent job explaining McQueen’s approach in that collection, which, after the technological innovations of his recent works, saw him return to the idea of craft, to “things that are being lost in the making of fashion. He was looking at the art of the Dark Ages but finding light and beauty in it,” Burton told Vogue at the time. “He was coming in every day, draping and cutting.”
Alexander “Lee” McQueen was admittedly a tough act to follow, and Burton’s work was subjected to merciless and unnerving scrutiny, but the truth is that she defined her own identity with the very first look she sent down the runway in her debut collection the following season. After the trauma of McQueen’s untimely death, she looked for inspiration to the healing power of nature and the rural English traditions she grew up with. Look number one of spring 2011 was a frock coat cut on eighteenth-century lines of the sort that McQueen himself loved, but Burton built it from ten layers of pale, fraying chiffon: a metaphor for the new, feminine softness she was ushering in. From the beginning, Burton’s gender has in many ways defined her point of difference with McQueen himself. In her quiet way, she helped to bring about both catharsis to her grieving team and aesthetic continuity and coherence to the house whose legacy she cherished—and whose secrets and mysteries she alone held in her head and her heart. But where McQueen drew on history and technology to explore his inner demons and reflect his often disquieting vision of a dystopian world, Burton uses those same themes and resources to celebrate her passion for traditions and craftsmanship, and the ways they can be harnessed to flatter a woman.
“For me it’s not just about a show or a review,” Burton says. “It’s about dressing women and how a piece makes them feel. As soon as you put a McQueen jacket on, you stand differently because it has a waist and it has a shoulder and it makes you feel empowered. It’s great if you can do that for women.”
The fruits of Burton’s training alongside McQueen are abundantly evident: Watching her during a fitting is an object lesson in perfectionism. Though Burton has a dedicated office in McQueen’s steel-and-glass HQ in London’s once-gritty East End, she admits that she rarely uses it. “Last year I wrapped my Christmas presents there,” she confides, “and that was it.” Instead, she wants to feel the collection she is working on in a light-flooded top-floor studio upstairs, surrounded by what she calls “a good chaos,” along with her gifted team of design collaborators. The soaring space resembles the treasure-stocked attic of a stately home, with carefully labeled containers filled with textile and embroidery samples stacked against its walls and an ever-changing array of panels covered in inspirational images propped next to them. (The company is on the verge of moving to bigger new premises in the same neighborhood. “It wouldn’t be McQueen if it wasn’t chaotic!” says Burton.)
Burton habitually wears a plump satin cushion bristling with neatly arranged pins on her wrist; she uses these to deftly smooth the line of a bodice so that it clings to the Amazonian body of Russian-born Polina Kasina, the fit model who has been with the house for twelve years and who, like Burton herself, carries a vital memory of hundreds of designs by both McQueen and Burton.
Perfectionism, after all, is in the house’s DNA. “When Lee was here,” Burton remembers, “we would actually color-code the pins—we’d paint the ends the same color as the fabrics,” so as not to impede the visual impact of the piece in progress.
“A lot of clothes today look like they haven’t been touched by a human hand, so they don’t fit properly,” she adds. “I think it’s really important that clothes are made for a woman’s body.”
Burton’s creative process is a collaborative one. “Each season, either we find a dress or a story or a place,” she explains of her work with her design team, “then it just sort of grows from there. It’s an amazing atmosphere here—a constant conversation. It’s a very organic way of working, and it all comes together in a collage.”
The sample atelier on the floor below Burton’s studio is the domain of the formidable Judy Halil, head of atelier, who trained with the queen’s dressmaker Sir Hardy Amies ( who made the Queens wedding dress) and has been a member of the McQueen family for 20 years. Halil presides over a technical team as dedicated and passionate as the designers upstairs. A battalion of mannequins stands sentinel in a corner, each padded to mirror the figure of one of McQueen’s celebrated couture clients, who now include Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Michelle Obama, and the Duchess of Cambridge, whose gown for her 2011 wedding to Prince William—which suavely combined romance, history, high style, and ceremony in a dress for the ages—propelled Burton to global fashion stardom. Added recently to this list are Elizabeth and Cecilia, the four-year-old twins of Burton and her husband, the droll photographer David Burton (the couple also have a year-old daughter, Romilly). For the twins’ school nativity play, Halil fashioned a plump robin and a swallow costume with perfectly crossed tail feathers, both crafted from individual feathers of silk taffeta laid over organza—an haute couture marvel that would churn the stomach of any hapless fellow parent struggling with a glue gun and some sticky-back felt, but one that has also been developed into a flock of dresses for Burton’s fall 2017 runway show.
With McQueen, research was largely carried out in the library at his and Burton’s alma mater Saint Martins, along with British Vogue’s basement archive, although inspiration might be triggered, as she remembers, “by something he’d read or seen on the telly.” Or at the bottom of his garden: An ancient elm by his country cottage inspired his fall 2008 collection. There were occasional field trips, too, including one haunting visit to Salem, Massachusetts, where McQueen’s ancestor Elizabeth Howe was hanged as a witch in the seventeenth century.
When Burton was thinking about her stirringly poetic and acclaimed spring 2017 collection, she took her design team on their first field trip—to Scotland’s Shetland Islands. “When you design collections from books or imagery, you don’t have that feeling of what the place is actually about,” she explains. “And if you just use Google, you get the same pictures as everybody else.”
“Brexit had just happened, too,” adds Burton, and after the unsettling divisiveness that she felt this represented, the islands reaffirmed “a sense of community and a family sense of belonging, of being together, of real values again, things that mean something—things that you want to pass down to your children.” (Perhaps with legacy also in mind, she and her husband are about to renovate a rambling early Victorian house in North London, which Burton was drawn to for its harmonious proportions and untouched period detailing. “We are bursting at the seams,” she says of their current house, a charmingly unpretentious and child-friendly place nearby.)
Burton, who admits that she has hoarder tendencies, still cherishes now historic McQueen pieces in her own wardrobe, and on trunk shows around the world she’s been touched to discover that many of the brand’s clients hold on to their favorite old pieces too. These customers, as she notes, “are really passionate about the clothes, whether it’s something that’s very functional or something to dream about. That whole ‘fast fashion . . .’ ’’ she says with a sigh. “I just couldn’t. It’s not possible for me. These are things that are meant to be forever—things that you buy and treasure.” As a concession, she will show her pre-fall 2017 collection to clients only when it is available in stores.
Burton is almost invariably drawn to Britain’s history and nature for her McQueen inspirations, and for this collection she started thinking about Cornwall, the mystic county at England’s westernmost tip where she spent many childhood holidays. It is a land of Arthurian legend, smugglers’ coves, and a famed diamond light that has attracted artists for more than a century.
Because the 250-piece-strong pre-fall collection is in stores longer than any other collection, Burton explains, “it has to represent everything the house is about.” She has decided, therefore, that the subsequent fall collection shown in Paris this month—what she dubs “the icing on the cake”—should build on this initial inspiration and further integrate the retail and runway experiences (the men’s McQueen collections will also fold in some of these ideas).
With this in mind, Burton has planned an intense two-day Cornish adventure for core members of her creative team. We arrive on a crisp late November morning at Tintagel, the site of a thirteenth-century castle long associated with the legend of King Arthur, a place of heart-stopping beauty set on a hilltop bluff high above the roiling Atlantic. Burton is struck by its “very eerie calm.” Soon it’s on to the wide, stirring wilderness of Bodmin Moor, with its mystic Bronze Age standing stones and towering rock formations.
At the picturesque tidal island of St. Michael’s Mount near Marazion the following day, the team is collectively mesmerized by the eddying swirls of seaweed in the rock pools that flank its stone path, which are exposed by the sea only at low tide. (McQueen himself, Burton tells me, was obsessed with National Geographic and once based a collection of dresses on images of jellyfish that he had torn from the pages of its magazine.) In the village of Zennor we stop at the twelfth-century fishermen’s church of St. Senara, its ceiling crafted like a ship’s hull. The church pews have been provided with prayer cushions covered in needlepoint by the industrious embroiderers of the parish, which send the team into paroxysms of delight. At the nearby harbor of St. Ives, an audience with a “local wisewoman” does not materialize, so we wend our way through the winding lanes and picturesque little villages outside of town in search of a field that contains a wishing tree. The dirt path that leads to it is latticed with branches crusted with fan-shaped lichen. “Embroidery, fabric manipulations, sequins—sorted,” says Burton with a gentle smile.
Burton and company returned from the islands with a haul of inspirations that included Fair Isle sweaters, balls of wool, gloves, shawls knitted as finely as lace, hand-loomed tweeds, and vivid memories of a Nordic, wind-lashed landscape and islanders whose crafts revealed their pride in what they do.
“Brexit had just happened, too,” adds Burton, and after the unsettling divisiveness that she felt this represented, the islands reaffirmed “a sense of community and a family sense of belonging, of being together, of real values again, things that mean something—things that you want to pass down to your children.” (Perhaps with legacy also in mind, she and her husband are about to renovate a rambling early Victorian house in North London, which Burton was drawn to for its harmonious proportions and untouched period detailing. “We are bursting at the seams,” she says of their current house, a charmingly unpretentious and child-friendly place nearby.)
Burton, who admits that she has hoarder tendencies, still cherishes now historic McQueen pieces in her own wardrobe, and on trunk shows around the world she’s been touched to discover that many of the brand’s clients hold on to their favorite old pieces too. These customers, as she notes, “are really passionate about the clothes, whether it’s something that’s very functional or something to dream about. That whole ‘fast fashion . . .’ ’’ she says with a sigh. “I just couldn’t. It’s not possible for me. These are things that are meant to be forever—things that you buy and treasure.” As a concession, she will show her pre-fall 2017 collection to clients only when it is available in stores.
Burton is almost invariably drawn to Britain’s history and nature for her McQueen inspirations, and for this collection she started thinking about Cornwall, the mystic county at England’s westernmost tip where she spent many childhood holidays. It is a land of Arthurian legend, smugglers’ coves, and a famed diamond light that has attracted artists for more than a century.
Because the 250-piece-strong pre-fall collection is in stores longer than any other collection, Burton explains, “it has to represent everything the house is about.” She has decided, therefore, that the subsequent fall collection shown in Paris this month—what she dubs “the icing on the cake”—should build on this initial inspiration and further integrate the retail and runway experiences (the men’s McQueen collections will also fold in some of these ideas).
With this in mind, Burton has planned an intense two-day Cornish adventure for core members of her creative team. We arrive on a crisp late November morning at Tintagel, the site of a thirteenth-century castle long associated with the legend of King Arthur, a place of heart-stopping beauty set on a hilltop bluff high above the roiling Atlantic. Burton is struck by its “very eerie calm.” Soon it’s on to the wide, stirring wilderness of Bodmin Moor, with its mystic Bronze Age standing stones and towering rock formations.
At the picturesque tidal island of St. Michael’s Mount near Marazion the following day, the team is collectively mesmerized by the eddying swirls of seaweed in the rock pools that flank its stone path, which are exposed by the sea only at low tide. (McQueen himself, Burton tells me, was obsessed with National Geographic and once based a collection of dresses on images of jellyfish that he had torn from the pages of its magazine.) In the village of Zennor we stop at the twelfth-century fishermen’s church of St. Senara, its ceiling crafted like a ship’s hull. The church pews have been provided with prayer cushions covered in needlepoint by the industrious embroiderers of the parish, which send the team into paroxysms of delight. At the nearby harbor of St. Ives, an audience with a “local wisewoman” does not materialize, so we wend our way through the winding lanes and picturesque little villages outside of town in search of a field that contains a wishing tree. The dirt path that leads to it is latticed with branches crusted with fan-shaped lichen. “Embroidery, fabric manipulations, sequins—sorted,” says Burton with a gentle smile.
Then, at the path’s turn, we are all stopped in our tracks by the sight of the tree itself growing at the edge of a spring-fed pond. Its low-spreading branches are tied with hundreds of multicolored strips of cloth representing the wishes and prayers of those who fixed them there. Among them, the team spots an elaborate cat’s cradle of thread, like a modern-art cobweb between the branches. Burton herself notices a baby’s bib, and then children’s socks.
“It’s quite upsetting,” she says, her voice breaking. “I don’t know why. It feels almost . . . intrusive.” She is soon sobbing softly to herself. Burton is feeling fragile: Discombobulated by Brexit and the recent American elections, she is formulating her creative responses.
These are revealed back at the London studio in early January. Burton has spent the Christmas holidays with her large family in the English countryside. “I live in two very different worlds!” she says. She confesses that she hasn’t taken a real holiday since the twins were born. Luckily, her beloved Irish nanny is getting married in County Cork this year, and Burton is thrilled about the the trip—and its promise of further design inspirations.
She admits she has been dreaming about the fall collection over the holiday break. “It’s quite nice when you stop for a minute,” she says, “and it’s very nice when you come back.”
Burton has returned to a studio with thematic boards covered in images from the Cornish trip. “Devil’s traps, dream catchers, enchanted sacred trees in the forest . . . the witchy board: I love how pagan this all feels,” says Burton. The Shetlands collection, she adds, “was very of-the-sea, but this is of the earth and the trees.” On the floor, Kim Avella, head of fabrics, has arranged exquisite color-shaded assemblages of images with fabrics old and new, the fragment of a flapper dress that Burton found years ago in a flea market, eighteenth-century ribbons still wrapped in ancient paper bearing copperplate writing exercises, and a pheasant’s plumage among them. “It’s not about a Pantone reference here!” Burton says wryly. The rivulets of waving grasses flowing down Tintagel’s steep slopes have been translated by knit maven Lucy Shaw into fairy-tale metallic knits “like maiden’s hair,” while loose-weave tweeds, randomly threaded with colored ribbons, evoke that mystic talisman tree. There are beautifully rendered watercolors of those Marazion seaweeds, and lichen iPhone snaps have been elaborately pieced and computer-engineered to create print prototypes—chez McQueen, these print and embroidery placements are so complicated that small-scale paper versions are constructed first; they sit around the studio like the denizens of a beautifully dressed doll’s house.
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