Fashion Evening Dresses

A triumph of powerful introspection

Not if you think fashion is about creativity, and creativity exists in its own universe. By those standards, Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen show was a triumph of gorgeous self-reference, inspired by the sea. (The third show this week so inspired, which suggests there’s some sort of global warming/oceanic thing happening.) There were echoes of her former boss’s 2001 show about models in an insane asylum that featured dresses made of razor clam shells and there was inspiration from his spring/summer 2003 collection “Shipwreck” with its shredded, sumptuous gowns, and his last collection, entitled “Plato’s Atlantis”.

So, though post-her triumph with Kate Middleton’s wedding dress , Ms Burton might have been expected to take the house McQueen built in a quieter, more accessible direction, this time around quasi-wearable (in McQueen terms) Fortuny-pleated skirt suits and dresses corseted in gold leather and edged in seaweed swirls were followed by baby-doll dresses, the skirts like balls of multicoloured barnacles, which were followed by pieced lace and oil slick patent leather versions of the same. These were succeeded by floor-sweeping empress-of-the-deep numbers, encrusted in coral and nacre and seed pearls.

Source: Financial Times