Lee Alexander McQueen brought his show to New York twice, first in 1996 with Dante and again in 1999 for Eye. The 1999 show will go down as among the wettest in fashion history, with torrential rain flooding the streets and a runway submerged in several inches of water. Sarah Burton was with him on both trips, and she was back in New York tonight to present her fall 2022 collection for the label. “America and New York have always been so much a part of McQueen,” she said backstage. “It feels part of our creative community. It’s great to honor that.”
This show was rooted in the elements, as well, though it wasn’t water that was her focus, but earth. Piles of mulch made from fallen trees gave off a peaty tang in the Brooklyn warehouse venue (it’ll be reused in plantings, she said), and birds and insects chirped on the speakers before the soundtrack settled into the groove of “A Forest” by The Cure. Backstage Burton was talking about mycelium, the underground fungal network that’s sometimes called nature’s “wood wide web,” connecting trees with one another and transferring nutrients and minerals plant-to-plant.
The humble mushroom has taken on a new vogue in recent years with the mainstreaming of psychedelics, but Burton laughed off a question about microdosing. “What I really love is that the trees talk to each other and they sort of heal each other,” she began. “The thing is, they’re healing, but they’re toxic as well. There’s a danger to them.” A pair of dresses were fantastically embroidered in mushrooms whose vivid colors Burton said were lifted from real life, their mycelia represented by long skeins of silk fringe. She might as well have been dosing so lysergic was their effect. A couple of unraveling sweaters were almost as trippy.
Burton’s McQueen is a thoughtful balance of hand craft and haute tailleur. She was in New York City, after all, so she didn’t neglect to show off the label’s sartorialism. A smoking with a crystal embellished back panel and a spangled bandeau in place of a shirt would be a glamorously restrained red carpet look for what’s likely to be a sober Oscars ceremony at the end of the month. Other sharply cut pantsuits picked up the psychedelic colors of those mushrooms—acid green and yellow, electric blue, bright red. “I wanted it to have a pace to it and an energy to it… and there to be color,” Burton said. “I wanted it to have a vibrancy.”
Most notable were the suits that looked like they’d been spray-painted with the shadow of a rushing body. Burton said these were inspired by yet another archival McQueen collection, Number 13, the show in which the model Shalom Harlow and her strapless white dress were painted by a pair of robots normally used in the automotive industry in a sort of erotic dance.
McQueen would’ve likely dug the mycelium; he was always intrigued by the elements, always finding his way back to a nature vs. machine theme. Many years on, that struggle is more real than ever. Burton brings that awareness and a woman-centered approach to what she’s doing here. Though no mushroom leather was used in the collection she said she and her team are running trials with it and with other substitute leathers, and that 85% of the collection’s materials were upcycled. Asked about her day-after-the-show itinerary, she said, “what you forget about is the light in New York, the light is so clear and sharp. Tomorrow, before she heads back to London, she has a plan: “I’d like to go see the light.”
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