An immersion in the environment in which we live and in the elements we experience every day, these are the basic codes that led Sarah Burton, creative director of Alexander McQueen, to create the SS 2022 collection.
Through the ever-changing and all-encompassing magnificence of the sky, seen through the huge windows which frame the style office in London, where the view goes from Saint Paul’s Cathedral to the London Eye, we wanted to observe the clouds’ colour changing from sunrise to sunset… and transmuting it into prints and dresses.
A poetic image which recalls the metamorphosis happening when the creative idea turns into the construction of the dress.
This is what the straight jackets with swollen backs talk about, the men’s shirts with superbly airy sleeves like those which could be remembered in the nineteenth-century salons, the double-breasted suit with masculine cut and pinstripe fabric, reworked with square shapes… the leather biker inserted in a cloud of tulle, the Prince of Wales suits transfigured by countless metal zips that mark the vital points of the body in motion.
It is a wonderful tale of creative simplicity that can be found in the accessories, as well as in the stockings-boots completely adorned with crystal embroidery, the same decoration that is replicated on the basis of the wide tulle net, and again in the very light corset dresses, and in the same denim bustiers crossed by bondage elements with wide leather straps.
Sarah Burton proves again that she has put on top of her attentions the fact that we can never be sure of what might happen next, a continuous and obsessive thought, almost a mantra that was repeated by the late Lee Alexander McQueen , founder of the Maison, and inseparable friend.