Swallowing: the process transferring a substance from the mouth to the stomach. Often, especially in food-based cases of the act, a highly pleasurable experience. Other (here unnamed) substances can be equally enjoyable. At one’s own discretion, of course. What better word, then, to emblazon across an item of clothing? As evidenced here by McQ’s latest “Swallow” collection, a collection that leaves behind it’s original bird-y connotations and opts instead for a more – let’s say bold – written slogan. SWALLOW. Oof, we love a piece of clothing that tells us what to do. “Swallow now leaves its decorative past behind and moves into visceral language, provocative and confrontational with lurid connotations,” McQ say. “The bird motif has been subverted and the word is explicitly written in gothic typeface, stamped across the collection”. But keen ornithologists / those of a more prudish persuasion, fear not, the bird species that first appeared in McQueen’s SS95 show still make an appearance, albeit it in a made-over form. “The swallow emblem is not lost but takes another form, re- designed by artist Tom Tosseyn, it has evolved with skull-like eyes and a sharply pointed body that flies defiantly across lambswool knits, tees and shirts.”
