What a sublime day!!
Saturday, 19 May 2018
Friday, 18 May 2018
Royal Dress Designer
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.
Thursday, 17 May 2018
Megan's Mum to walk her down the aisle
With Megan's Dad bowing out, as did Serina William's Dad on the morning of the wedding. The question is who will walk the bride down the aisle tomorrow. I would love to see her Mum, Doria Ragland be by her daughter's side in that moment.
On such an important day as your Big Day the idea of one of your parents handing you over to the groom to be is a symbol of the next big stage of your life. When Kerry to married, her Dad was sadly not with them and of course Flo, her Mum took on that honor. You can see from the photo Flo's looks the nervous one while Kerry looks confident and radiant. I did make both Kerry and Flo's outfits to compliment each other.
Today Doria meets the Queen and none of us know yet whether the topic of walking down the aisle will be discussed. However while they sip the tea I reckon the wedding day will be the mean conversation.
Meghan was said to be hugely relieved when her mother arrived in England, and she has been helping to keep her calm and grounded. It sounds like yoga teacher Doria won’t have any problem charming the Queen, who is known to go out of her way to make newcomers feel welcome.
Doria was captured with this outfit in her hands.
So I'm guessing without pre warning this could be the outfit that walks down the aisle. I hope the colour compliments the brides ensemble.
Burberry lace dress that would suit lovely style wise but the colour might not work.
Shoes, well they would be massively important!! Will Doria have to consider another outfit at the last minute?
Never a wedding without a bit of trauma and excitement.
Breaking new s Prince Charles has just been promoted, well I suppose he has experience on his CV.! Now Prince Charles is to walk Meghan Markle down the aisle at the royal wedding, Kensington Palace has announced.
The prince is said to be "pleased" to be welcoming Ms Markle to the Royal Family by giving her away.
The palace statement in full read: "Ms Meghan Markle has asked His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales to accompany her down the aisle of the quire of St George's chapel on her wedding day. The Prince of Wales is pleased to be able to welcome Ms Markle to the Royal Family in this way."
Get your outfit sorted Charles
The secrets of designing a royal wedding dress
Sassi Holford knows better than most the pressures of making a wedding dress that the world will analyse, pick over, love or hate.
The designer who’s based in Taunton in Somerset, was asked by Autumn Kelly, the then fiancée of Peter Phillips, the Queen’s grandson, to make her wedding dress a decade ago.
This week the TV visited her at her studio and workshop, a hive of activity in the midst of wedding season.
With Meghan Markle’s dress about to be unveiled on Saturday, she remembers every detail of her royal experience, and in particular, the demands for total secrecy.
Sassi could tell only a select few who the dress was really for, and they had to do their work before normal office hours, sometimes at daybreak, to avoid the rest of her employees.
She even had to give the bride a false name - they chose Kelly Winter for Autumn - and keep away from windows, and prying eyes and cameras, by working on the first floor.
The dress itself had to have covered shoulders as befitting a wedding in a royal chapel, and it had to have a design that would work in a large room, with TV cameras trained on it.
Oh yes, and then there was the royal tradition of having to get the approval from the Queen. It may be more of a courtesy, but Sassi was informed the Queen always likes to see the dresses worn by brides about to join her family, before the big day. Fortunately Autumn's dress received the royal seal of approval, and the designer was then invited to take her entire workforce by coach to Windsor for the wedding.
Although Holford was already an established dress designer when she got the royal commission, her profile soared internationally.
She says she doesn’t know who’ll be going the designing duties for Meghan. Instead Holford believes it will be someone who is a good friend of hers, perhaps Stella McCartney. She also predicts the dress will be simple, with long sleeves and a high neck - though she’s hoping for some kind of Hollywood homage in the design. So it seems like this rest of us, Sassi will have to wait until the bride arrives at St George’s Chapel on Saturday.
Was this "V" for victory & a clue?
Wednesday, 16 May 2018
If Megan asked for my help, what would I have suggested.
Something like this seems quite right.
As with any bride the venue the couple choose and the time of year has an influence on their wedding ensemble. If I was Megan I would secretly be trying real hard but trying to look like I wasn't I would play it all down. Not too fairytale, a bit sensible so I don't offend but as personal as possible. For me that's what a wedding should be, really personal.
You will be influenced by what your friends and former and future family have had in the past that you might want to avoid but you still have to choose what you want 'Your Day Your Way'
Nothing too bare!
So dress wise, something to suit your body shape and your personality. Lots of choices for Megan. How different , on trend, how safe or how traditional? I think she will favour the latter two to please as many people as possible. She would have to be brave and bold to dare to be different. If they had been engaged longer I think she could have dared a bit not.
Psychology is a fascinating thing and it's a very big part of life. We all want to do things our way but we quite often want to please people and be loved and liked by as many people.
With any bride of mine I want to find out who they are and what makes them happy. What dress will make the radiant in their Big Day.
So my advice to Megan, let's go for feminine elegance presence and charm. Given her new position, her new status, and her new role the pressure is on to get this right. However I think she should think too of what Prince Harry would like.
He always like a laugh and seems good fun, so let's not go too safe and boring. Something fun in the detail.
Soft and floating, free and fun, nothing too serious. It's all about the detail. Lovely and fitted at her waist and wrists showing off her fine features in a delicate way.
If I had an influence on the embroidery work I would be sneaking in a Shamrock ( three hearts together, lots of love) a rose for England and a star or two for America
I definitely would go for a circular skirt with a good flow into a generous train making Megan feel like a princess. She has lots of other occasions she will be able to wear a more simple figure hugging dress.
Monday, 14 May 2018
A Right Royal Wedding
It's a really exciting week for me and I'm buzzing!! You can but imagine the fever pitch of all those involved in the preparations. Like any wedding there is so much to organise and remember, so much that needs planning and everything to be checked and double checked! Has anything been forgotten? What will we do if!!!'
We know who's doing the cake, the flowers and the photography but who else is involved!! All we need it a sunny day!! It takes more than that! I bet everyone of you having planned a wedding or in the middle of planning a wedding knows all those stresses. I often think it's like lots of Christmas Day's rolled into one, so much thought goes into it and as adults it's the closest we get to the excitement of Santa Claus coming.
I'm sure some of you are tired of hearing about the eminent
wedding this weekend in London but I can't help it, it's my bread and butter!
If the last one is anything to go by it will introduce us to people
and ideas that will inspire and influence the next few years of
weddings throughout the length and breadth of the countryside.
This one is already proving different with some of the invited
having to bring their own picnics! On April fools day when it
was suggested that a dog might be present I actually believed
it for a second or too!! There were constraints on Kate and
William, but will Megan and Harry truly able to do it their way on
their Big Day?
So I'm excited to see the outcome.
So let's hope this that it is a marriage of two people who are so in love and so happy and that everything goes according to their plans. That its the best day of their life's so far and that the continue to inspire and support each other improving and developing ideas to better their lives and the people around them.
And we have just heard that these two will be on duty, Kate might not be so close on hand to control them this time, could spell FUN!!
Will it be R&R? I think not! I think a British or an American designer. Who do you think?
If Megan has gone by The Queen's recommendation it will be Stewart Parvin.
It might be him, this is Stewart doing some sketches. I have been lucky and meet him.
I don't know if I should be writing my thoughts but I was a bit disappointed in the dress he did for Zara's wedding dress so if I were Megan I would go hear what ideas Sarah Burton had at McQueen!! Or maybe Philippa Lepley that would be a safe choice.
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