"Quintessentially McQueen, his final, magisterial collection was a poignant coda to a career characterized by ceaseless invention, curiosity, and lightning flashes of absolute brilliance. The collection was presented in a stately room of white and gold Louis XV boiserie, in what was once the hôtel particulier of the noble Clermont-Tonnerre family. The models appeared one by one, to the hauntingly beautiful accompaniment of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (the music that McQueen had been listening to as he created this collection). Their faces were powdered by Peter Philips as wan as van Eyck Madonnas, their heads were bound by Guido Palau like medieval wimples and crowned with bristling Mohican plumes, and they struck attitudes that recalled the iconic images of the Byzantine empress Theodora.
McQueen himself had worked on each of the sixteen looks, elaborately draping each on the stand ("He hated too many seams," explained Sarah Burton, the designer's long-term collaborator and now head of design of the house that bears his name). McQueen saw this collection as "going back to craft" after the übermodernity of his spring/summer 2010 "Plato's Atlantis" show; the shoe heels, worked like Grinling Gibbons carvings, and the embroideries, as heavy as crusader armor or as light as spiderwebs, all revealed his easy command of magnificent embellishment. But he also harnessed modern technology to ancient craft tradition, translating Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights
The wondrous clothes provided in some ways a summation of everything that McQueen had learned throughout his career, from his days pad-stitching collars for a Savile Row bespoke tailor, to the lessons absorbed from the great technicians of the Givenchy haute couture ateliers, to his own hands-on experiments. "He always started with the form and knew everything about how to construct a garment," said Burton. "He felt he had to know everything about tailoring, everything about dressmaking. He'd always surprise us in fittings. We would tell him something was technically impossible—and in the morning there would be something amazing on the mannequin, even if he had to work all night to achieve it."
By Hamish Bowles. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz
McQueen himself had worked on each of the sixteen looks, elaborately draping each on the stand ("He hated too many seams," explained Sarah Burton, the designer's long-term collaborator and now head of design of the house that bears his name). McQueen saw this collection as "going back to craft" after the übermodernity of his spring/summer 2010 "Plato's Atlantis" show; the shoe heels, worked like Grinling Gibbons carvings, and the embroideries, as heavy as crusader armor or as light as spiderwebs, all revealed his easy command of magnificent embellishment. But he also harnessed modern technology to ancient craft tradition, translating Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights
The wondrous clothes provided in some ways a summation of everything that McQueen had learned throughout his career, from his days pad-stitching collars for a Savile Row bespoke tailor, to the lessons absorbed from the great technicians of the Givenchy haute couture ateliers, to his own hands-on experiments. "He always started with the form and knew everything about how to construct a garment," said Burton. "He felt he had to know everything about tailoring, everything about dressmaking. He'd always surprise us in fittings. We would tell him something was technically impossible—and in the morning there would be something amazing on the mannequin, even if he had to work all night to achieve it."
By Hamish Bowles. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz
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