October 10, 2022 |
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t noticed Alexander McQueen’s glaring absence on the post-pandemic Paris show schedule. There it was, that hallowed Monday night slot, left all blank and bare and available, as if any catch-up sleep, dinner date or night off could fill the multi-buckle hybrid biker boots of Sarah Burton OBE.
The text message arrived a few days into the shows and it couldn’t have come quickly enough: “Do you want to come to New York for our show?” It was the gorgeous Ali McCallum: McQueen communications maven, restaurateur’s husband and the strongest man in fashion. Not only was Burton back, but she was closing the first full show season after the pandemic, and on the other side of the Atlantic at that. And so, we were off to New York.
The new British Airways business class is a godsend. As enjoyable as it was being squeezed together like sardines, watching endless Marvel films, and being confronted with a stranger staring you in the face whenever the stewardess (for literally no reason) put the divider screen down to hand you a drink, nothing beats aerodynamic solitude. The TV screen does make it physically impossible to bend your knees in the flatbed position if you’re over the age of eight, but the little sliding door is so good you almost forget your crippling claustrophobia. BA’s High Life Entertainment doesn’t disappoint and once you accept that Olivia Colman is in every film and series you’ll ever watch again, at least that’s one fewer decision you have to make.
Arrive at JFK, wait for bags, find driver. The travelling sisterhood of the flying destination show hasn’t changed much over the pandemic and it’s probably for the best that we’re well- acquainted since six people on the backseat of an SUV into Manhattan gets a little intimate. But hey, we’re back in New York! We took a long-haul flight! We breathed on each other in a confined moving space for an hour and a half! There was a time in 2020 when all these things seemed unachievable, but thanks to McQueen and vaccines and overpriced flow tests, we are back in business. What’s also back in business is The Standard hotel by the Highline: hipsters live! They look more like the cast of Euphoria now, but they live, and they’re still sniffling in the lobby for no apparent reason.
Time for a quick Fox News fix to reaffirm one’s sanity and then it’s off to get a store cocktail. There are many things a pandemic can put an end to, but store cocktails will prevail, and Greene Street – which houses the Alexander McQueen shop – is lined with trucks with giant TV screens playing McQueen videos like the metaverse has come to life. Then it’s dinner downtown at Casa Cipriani where even milelong banqueting tables decked out in gold and white flowers – and the actual artichoke salad from Harry’s Bar in Venice – cannot overshadow the dazzling glitz of McQueen’s private clientele. If Debbie Harry had a love child with Cher and it was raised by Daphne Guinness, it would still be on the waiting list for this kind of demi-couture.
Back to The Standard where it’s jetlag central for the travelling sisterhood (but the night is young for the neo-hipsters). There’s an optional museum trip in the morning, which everyone says they’re going to do but refills at chemist chain Duane Reade end up taking priority. Then it’s lunch at Frenchette where a foreign press diva uses a mild allergic reaction to make sure that she’s the talk of the trip. After Covid, it turns out, hyperventilation is the new prima donna meltdown. Then it’s off to James Perse in Soho to reinstate an old Fashion Week tradition of always bringing back a $200 white T-shirt. (Yes, yes, they’ve got three stores in London, but it’s not the same.) Uptown to Central Park for a walk because everything feels exotic in a post- pandemic world and it would be criminal not have a martini at The Carlyle.
While we’ve been frolicking, Sarah Burton’s been hard at work setting up her show in the Agger Fish Building in Brooklyn, and if anyone could make these UK uptown girls cross the bridge, it’s McQueen. Giant molehills of shredded timber cut from fallen trees (and shipped to farms for sustainable purposes post-show) shoot up from the floor as we enter the show space, scenting the place with an eau de bio you rarely find in the city (and yet it’s strangely familiar). Readers with good long- term memories will remember the epiphanies of the lockdown period: allowing our cities to breathe and reconnecting with nature in big environmental harmony. They’re lessons that Burton hasn’t forgotten. She may be showing in New York, but the industrial landscape of her Brooklyn location feels entirely reclaimed by nature.
Typically poetic, her show notes muse about mycelium: the magical underground world of trees and mushroom roots that connect with the living organism of nature. Backstage after the show, Burton will assure the congregated press that her mushroom-centric show hasn’t had her micro-dosing, although after all those gruelling days of show prep she says, “I probably need to!” Luckily, you don’t have to do mushrooms to get a kick out of McQueen. With Helena Christensen looking goddess-y in a pink suit front row, joined by Letitia Wright and Evan Mock, the show unfolds in elegantly draped leather dresses and biker jackets that morph into bustiers, mini-dresses and jumpsuits.
It’s a conversation between hard and soft, as Burton explains: “The thing about mushrooms is that they’re healing but toxic at the same time. There’s a danger to them.” You could say the same for the razor-sharp but sensual jackets she sends out next – some adorned in graffiti-like prints – which gets us all in the mood for wearing super-refined tailoring again. These suits mean business and you couldn’t find a more appropriate stomping ground than New York for a return to this type of wardrobe. “It’s a fast city,” Burton says of the Big Apple, a home away from home for the brand where Lee McQueen presented his Dante collection in 1996 (after its launch in Spitalfields, London) and his Eye collection in early 2000. “I wanted to have a pace to it, an energy to it, and a precision to the tailoring and the colour,” she says.
The pièce de résistance, of course, are the dresses Burton spends months perfecting to the tiniest seam. She sends them out like a sensory overload, one wow moment after another: silhouettes that look as if they’re blossoming, created from multi-coloured knitwear that adds a hand-spun, almost hippie- punk quality to her urban rewilding. “I wanted to have a vibrancy and a sense of individual character to each dress in the way that we have all these characters in our McQueen family,” she says. “It felt like all these different characters could exist in New York, or in any city, and it definitely influenced the way I did the collection.” Bringing the collection here, she explains, is about embracing her American clientele. “It’s about talking to the women that we dress and showing it to them so that they can have the experience as well. It’s very important.”
After the show, everyone simply must get a picture in front of a molehill (isn’t fashion the best?) before making our way back to the post-show party at The Standard where they’re serving martinis and tiny cornets of chips in the upstairs bar. Some of us take a late-night detour to Sant Ambroeus in the West Village, where the vitello tonnato is still sublime. Back at The Standard, a room party next door that’s still going strong at 5am has to be dispersed by hotel security, but at least it wakes up the sisterhood in time for the re-see back in the show venue in Brooklyn. And so, we cross the bridge again but luckily gorgeous Ali has a 10am glass of champagne ready and we all ooh and ah at Burton’s masterpieces before pouring back into the SUV to go to Zitomer on the Upper East Side, a legendary store among the sisterhood which carries an enticing mix of hair jewellery, tiny picture frames and vibrators.
A giggly afternoon walk on the pier with friends and design collaborators Helena Christensen and Camilla Stærk is followed by goodbye martinis at the hotel with Karla Otto’s Princess Lissy von Schwarzkopf, who is likely the poshest person to ever set foot in The Standard at the Highline. And just like that, in a New York minute, the travelling sisterhood is back at JFK where a fabulous McQueen trip comes to an end as we order literally everything on the lounge menu and a month of shows and time zones has yours truly drifting off at the table. Next to us, an intriguing argument is unfolding between a husband and his wife, whose former husband has apparently just died and she’s now tearfully telling the current husband how the ex was “always emasculated by my wealth”. It’s the kind of experience that makes you grateful we can travel again, because life was never quite the same without airport lounge people and private fashion clients. The Alexander McQueen trip goes down in history as a post-pandemic return to some of the things we love most about fashion, and a Sarah Burton spectacular to remember.
Photography by Chloe Le Drezen. Taken from Issue 69 of 10 Magazine – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – out now. Purchase here.
