Though taken from the semantic field of clothing and adornment, the word "cutter" bears some sinister connotations. It calls to mind not just a professional figure working in a tailoring workshop, but conjures up visions of cutting tools and, consequently, of blood as well. It's a word best embodied by Leonard Burling, the English cutter with a mysterious past who runs a custom tailor shop in Graham Moore’s film The Outfit.
Maybe it is the double-edged meaning of this word that Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen had in mind while working on the house's A/W 23 collection, showcased last Saturday during Paris Fashion Week.
Returning to the Paris runway after a three-year absence, Burton put the sharpness of tailoring at the forefront of the collection. So, like other designers in Paris, Burton went back to the beginnings of the house and in particular to the formative years of its founder on Savile Row.
Rigorous tailoring inspired her a genderless corseted jumpsuit, waist-nipping jackets, a series of black suits, tailored strapless dresses and pinstriped coats and suits in which the broken pinstripes seemed drawn with a tailor's chalk (an effect inspired by the scene in Todd Field's film Tár in which a tailor makes chalk marks on the fabric for the protagonist's suit View this photo).
Burton's precision hinted at restriction, but also at subversion with dresses that looked as if they were made disassembling a jacket or turning it upside down and twisting it around the body, and jackets in which the upper collar was elongated and formed a notch at mid-torso height.
One three quarter jacket was turned upside down and the hem formed another lapel. Visually that was a clever optical illusion achieved via tailoring; metaphorically, it hinted at the topsy-turvy world we live in (an idea reinforced by a video rendition of the stop-motion Victorian photography of Eadweard Muybridge ran upside down on the walls of the venue).
The same precision was applied to workwear-inspired ensembles in denim, while decadently elegant and erotically charged (petals were strategically placed on the body) prints of giant orchids on dramatic trenchcoats, pointed at the poisonous tropical flowers in Jean des Esseintes' À rebours and the description of these flowers in the book came to mind: "Then, there are flowers of noble lineage like the orchid, so delicate and charming, at once cold and palpitating, exotic flowers exiled in the heated glass palaces of Paris, princesses of the vegetable kingdom living in solitude."
The idea of rigorous sharpness pointing at the body and therefore at flesh and blood, unlocked another inspiration – anatomy.
To build a great piece, a talented fashion designer must know the structure of a garment, but also the configuration of the body, starting with the bones.
References to bones first appeared in this collection in a black dress that looked like a modern reinvention of Schiaparelli's skeleton dress, and that featured a padded cordon tracing the human silhouettes around the shoulders, arms and hips.
Anatomy redirected Burton towards Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical sketches that she used as the main inspiration for her knitwear: the drawings showing sliced limbs and the internal structure of muscles, allowed Burton to come up with knitwear dresses with braided cables forming an unravelling skirt and tops with cutouts.
The same technique was applied to a dark blood red dress covered in bugle beads that ended in a slashed skirt (a hint at McQueen's ruby red Joan of Arc dress, at the end of his A/W 1998 show in London? Maybe, after all the musical note soundtrack of the "Joan" collection played in reverse in this show, even though this version of the dress was also slightly reminiscent of Pierre Cardin's 1970 dress with kinetic back View this photo).
As seen in previous posts, anatomy has always provided great inspirations in fashion (Christopher Kane's S/S 23 collection was inspired by this theme), yet Burton didn't offer a literal interpretation of this discipline, but preferred to reinterpret Leonardo da Vinci's drawings through materials and techniques.
Knowing the starting point for these designs it became easy to see strips of flesh in the hanging strips of fabric covered in beads, while a silver design, a sort of St. Joan of Arc armour replicating the structure of the muscles, but also the shape of an orchid around the bodice, reunited all the three main inspirations in this collection – tailoring, anatomy and decadent botany.
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