On Tuesday night Alexander McQueen unveiled its latest collection in New York. The British brand normally shows in Paris but, like a number of other labels, it has treated the enforced topsy-turviness of the past couple of years as an opportunity to try a new approach.
Most of its peers have now returned to being “on schedule”, as it is known in the industry. In contrast, the house of McQueen is — as its creative director Sarah Burton put it after the show — “quite liking having our own rhythm for a minute”.
Last season it showed in London, the city where it all began, in a pop-up bubble-like construction on the roof of a car park. This time around the venue was a Brooklyn warehouse of ecclesiastical proportions, filled with mountains of something which, on closer inspection, proved to be woodchips.
Burton’s inspiration was, on the one hand, the “vibrancy of New York”, and on the other, mycelium, the root-like fungus “that enables trees to communicate with each other and is a metaphor for interconnection between people”.
So far, so incongruous. Except, with a designer of Burton’s talent, it was anything but. Such apparently diverse reference points overlapped in surprising ways.
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The acid brights that spoke of the city, for example, were in fact copied from specific fungi. And while the web-like multi-hue dresses and knits may have looked like something the New York Dolls would have worn, they were also inspired by mycelium, described as “the wood wide web” by the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.
The razor-sharp tailoring, however, was pure City that Never Sleeps. Bright trousersuits with Don Draper shoulders were covered in graffiti-like prints. Black tuxedo jackets and bandage dresses were sliced to offer up unexpected flashes of bare flesh.
Similarly revelatory were the big-skirted princess dresses slashed to the thigh, and the leather biker jacket that had been reinvented as a bustier jumpsuit. As for the intricate silver minidress — modelled by Cindy Crawford’s daughter, Kaia Gerber — it out-glittered even the Chrysler Building.
This was McQueen at its most seductive. Never has the mushroom looked so chic.
