ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: Silvery Mother-of-Pearl by Alexander McQueen

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Silvery Mother-of-Pearl by Alexander McQueen

Paris Fashion Week - Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2012 by Sarah Burton: "It's all about Gaia, the wonder of nature, the sea."

With this one, she, like Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy and Karl Lagerfeld at CHANEL, and VERSACE, made her theme aquatic. Burton, howeever, must have thought long and hard before taking that plunge though, because the underwater world was also the ominous, apocalyptic theme Alexander McQueen explored in his last show, "Plato's Atlantis", for his spring 2010 collection. He saw the world drowned by global warming and women morphing into sea mammals with crustacean feet.

Enjoy the Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2012 Fashion Show at the end of this post by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories - The Fashion Channel.

Burton's way of looking at clothes is lighter than that of her former boss in both senses. Her collection despite the fact taht it honored McQueen's classic silhouette in the strict, suited opening, and his aggression in the lace-masked heads and gleaming, fetish black leather is actually far more life-affirming and free of construction. But there is not one iota of slipping back in the question of quality. In fact, this show, with all its allusions to coral, sea anemones, barnacles, frondy seaweed, silvery mother-of-pearl, and bone-white seashell, was practically at the level of a Parisian couturier, but created out of McQueen London studio, with the help of those many interns and their chiffon-massaging fingers.

Rich and imaginatively extraordinary as it was, it also elevated the McQueen identity to a diplomatic fantasy-plane beyond which questions can't be asked. Speulations as to exactly which dress the Duchess of Cambridge might choose from this fantasia are impossible. Like most women, she never dresses this opulenty in real life. Any woman who wants a translation of the froth and the curviform peplums which appear here will without a doubt find it in the parallel commercial collections Sarah Burton has sorted out just as beautifully.

Observing it all somewhere a little further off, David Burton, the designer's photographer-husband, remarked, "When you think about everything that's happened to her in the past eighteen months, you just couldn't make it up, could you?"