McQ Alexander McQueen has a longstanding reputation for collaborating with outsider creators. In the last year alone, photographic legend Nan Goldin has shot a series for them featuring British club kids, while Belgian-Ethiopian artist Ermias Kifleyesus was tapped to deface Harley Weir’s Fall 2015 ad campaign.

Their latest creative partnership comes via American collage artist Jesse Draxler, who collaborated with photographer J Whitaker and set designer Kelly Fondry to create imagery which he transformed into series of dark artworks. “I cut up this photo set on a pretty regular basis for about a month and a half straight – going through hundreds of X-Acto blades,” he recalls. “I then treated the pieces like an abstract puzzle and played until things start to click.”

Though some pieces take a matter of days to physically complete, he says, “I spend a lot of time writing and journaling. To me, the inception starts with thinking about it or processing an idea in my mind.”

This collaboration also serves to mark the Swallow capsule collection, which repurposes an archive McQueen motif into a series of provocative new pieces.