Shop the interactive Alexander McQueen Pre-Fall 2019 collection as Sarah Burton and her team looked to England’s north to build a collection combining a collage of contrasting regional elements into an innovative and harmonious whole.
The cut crystals threaded upon a sleeveless house-shouldered tailored jacket and strung along the surface of layered lace and tulle dresses were nods to the grandiose chandeliers of Blackpool’s great gilded ballrooms.
That jacket and almost every other in the collection were cut with a low skirt, a semi-peaked lapel, and a single button, then placed above triple-pleated peg-leg pants to muster a silhouette meant as tribute to the Neo-Edwardian style of northern 1950s teddy girls. Some of the suits came in a silk-printed rip-edged photo collage of rose images, both as tribute to those evergreen floral symbols of the north—Lancashire v. York—and the album art of Factory Records. The rose motif rambled through the collection, reappearing as embroideries on jackets or metallic relief on powdery pink, nylon-shot silk jacquard suits and a deconstructed bodice top with side skirt. A washed silk duchesse dress in the collage print featured a Victorian bustle back with a tulle-pumped, exploded couture-style sleeve, while a long white waffle cotton shirtdress referenced the made-in-Manchester suffragette movement.
Evening suits featured painstakingly assembled sequin portraits of cormorants, one of the symbols of Liverpool.