Alexander McQueen is a British luxury fashion house founded by the designer Alexander McQueen in 1992. His achievement in fashion earned him four British Designer of the Year awards. The house’s early collections developed its reputation for controversy and shock tactics with trousers aptly named “bumsters “and a collection entitled Highland Rape. Alexander McQueen has launched his first menswear collection in spring/summer 2005 and continues to show his collection during Milan Fashion Week. The company launched its first women pre spring collection on the runway with its men’s collection on June 2008.
This season McQueen’s woman was said to be a night time creature that drifts between dream and reality and this was certainly one of Sarah Burton’s most romantic collection to date. The clothes had an extraordinary softness of flash laid bare under strict tailoring or of the body wrapped in a duvet dressing robe. The clothes came scattered with charms, butterflies, moon, lips and clock all in abundance. The puffy garment was taken to the highest couture level with stitched pink flowers and beds of green leaves. The bosoms of a woman who was dressed in a petal-patterned brassiere under the sharp tailoring of a coat, worn open.
The light side of womanhood was elegantly expressed in the powdery color for soft and fluffy piece like this quilted jacket you can see in the picture, made from padded satin and edges with white fluffy fur. Other black dress is designed in the stuff of embroidered net and its transparent base was smothered with butterflies and birds made in shadowy black pearls.
The underlay lower skirt is designed in black satin and the girl worn this dress with long black boots.
The dresses are designed in leather in long coat style with belt. Each one leather dress is hand printed. Such is the extraordinary sophistication of hand work and that Burton puts into her collections that its wonders are only truly read close up. Butterflies are painted on leather dresses and each wing of butterfly is expertly defined with artistic paint brush. The leather was incredibly fine and soft, hardly leather looking at all either. Burton noted, “We have treated leather in a different way, as if it was a fabric”.
Clothes like these are a very far cry from humdrum commercial fare to fill the gaps in stores between seasons. With Burton’s softening touch, they transcend the source material to become very special, non disposable items a woman might want to keep forever. The only question mark is over how incredibly pieces like these can be best understood and appreciated. The reality of what they actually are cannot really be captured in static photography, and they whip by at distance on runway, they are difficult to see, too. May be McQueen should come up with some alternative way of viewing of these beautiful things.
