Hair: Christian Eberhard at Management Artists using ORIBE. Make-up: Hannah Murray at Art and Commerce. Model: Kiki Willems at Viva London. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Manicure: Laura Forget at Artlist. Digital tech: Nicolas Fallet. Photographic assistants: Paul Jedwab, Loc Boyle and Margaux Jouanneau. Styling assistants: George Pistachio and Christelle Owona Nisin. Tailor: Sebastien Pleus. Production: Julie Sanchez at Works Production. Production assistants: Julie Rondeau, Bertrand d’Amiens and David Smit. Post-production: D-Factory
“Making this collection was pretty much the one thing that I wasn’t worried about when we first went into lockdown. Then, once we finally came back into the studio, these characters appeared. The clothes themselves were almost like characters – individual. Maybe because people had more time to work on one piece, they almost became more special. You had to be more decisive about what you wanted, about what you really wanted to say”
- Sarah Burton, January 2021
A little-appreciated fact: Sarah Burton first arrived at Alexander McQueen in 1996. She has been with the house for 25 years now, a quarter of a century and more than half her life. It remains the stuff of fashion legend that, back then, the Prestbury-raised, Saint Martins-educated designer – then named Sarah Heard – was on an internship, introduced to McQueen by Simon Ungless, her print tutor and his friend and collaborator. While she went back to finish her degree – she was diligent from the offset – she returned to McQueen in 1997. And never left.
Despite that background, this has undoubtedly been a formative decade for Burton. Her first solo collection for Alexander McQueen was shown during the Spring/ Summer 2011 Paris season, exactly ten years before this one. Throughout that time, she has been widely celebrated – even loved – making the transition from first assistant to her mentor to creative director of an international fashion brand. She helms an awe-inspiring and closely guarded legacy that she helped to create, today perpetuating and reinventing it season after season. And she oversees absolutely everything – womenswear, menswear, accessories, campaigns, communications, retail concepts. Burton has created an educational studio space – home to presentations including Unlocking Stories and Roses – opening up the layered and complex process behind the creation of McQueen collections past and present on the top floor of the Bond Street flagship store. She conceived the design of that too, along with the architect Smiljan Radic, using a concept that has now been rolled out across the world to 65 McQueen stores. She has held workshops for students covering everything from research to sketching to draping. More recently, Burton has worked with young teenagers, producing smaller sizes of McQueen designs for them and giving them materials with which to customise their pieces, encouraging them to style themselves and be photographed with their contemporaries.
Burton does this because she is driven, and
