The Alexander McQueen design studio is an airy, skylit space on the top floor of the company headquarters on Clerkenwell Road, London. A new collection is taking shape under the aegis of Sarah Burton, McQueen’s design assistant for 15 years and the natural heir to his legacy.
Lined with display boards and an impressive library of books, the space is probably tidier than when McQueen was in charge. For one thing, his massage chair is gone. So is the dog basket. What has remained unchanged, however, is the breadth and depth of material on the boards. When McQueen was creating a collection, Burton compiled much of this material on his behalf, integrating his past inspirations with his present inclinations. “I’m a hoarder,” she said. “I’ve kept every one of Lee’s drawings.”
Fortunately, this includes material that predates Burton’s arrival in 1996, such as the drawings from his MA graduation collection at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1992, entitled “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.” These early drawings are a revelation, illustrating signature designs such as a frock coat, signature details such as a peaked shoulder,
and signature techniques such as corsetry, slashing, fringing and featherwork. Everything is rendered with a startling precision.
Another student project features a split jacket with a twist in the middle, a detail that resurfaced in McQueen’s first couture collection for Givenchy in 1997. According to Burton, McQueen never referred back to these early drawings, proving that his aesthetic operated on a primal, instinctive level. Delicate lacework, the Celtic macabre, classic men’s suiting, the severe tailoring of the 1940s, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, all added a sophisticated gloss to one of the most coherent, persuasive design vocabularies of the past two decades.
Burton pulls from the shelves the book she says was McQueen’s favorite — McDowell’s Directory of Twentieth- Century Fashion, published in 1985. McQueen was still in high school when the book was written, but looking at some of its chapter headings — “Clothes as a Weapon,” “Fashion and the Arts,” “Creating the Line,” “From Salon to Street,” “The First Couturier” — one muses that he could have been its consummate subject.