For every corseted, full-skirted dress, there were boxy, boy-tailored suits, denims fiercely intersected with zipped and buckled black leather, and boldy-elegant tuxedos her hybrids of tailoring and dressmaking, cut short. It led to a show that felt earthed in a female-gaze translation of the gritty London energy of the Alexander McQueen tradition of street and underground. “We wouldn’t have done that if we'd been on that train.” There’s been a sort of community of women a great relationship with a group,” she reflected. “They’re each so different, so individual. “Because of the situation we’re in, it’s been very much working 3-D, one-on-one with models, and people from different walks of life, not all of them models.” She said that anything that felt stylistically imposed on them got scrapped and redone. She’d flipped her creative and imaginative process-the usual build-up to showing in the framework of Paris-to refocus on making clothes more collaboratively, reflecting the characters of the women who came into the London studio for fittings.

Sun, rain, storm-whatever comes, you have to just keep going.” The fact is, we’re not in control of the situation. And how you have to just face it with bravery. “And I’ve been thinking about what we've all been through: this constant feeling that you don’t know what the next day is going to be. And then this kind of ferocious sky,” she observed. Some days it can be kind of very calm, a very beautiful dappled sky. “There’s that sense that the sky is ever-changing-this constant change that’s uncontrollable. It was a metaphor inspired by the spectacular rolling skies that she and the McQueen team see from the studio every day, and yet equally grounded in her new sense of dealing with the reality of the here-and-now. For her first real-life Alexander McQueen show since the pandemic crashed down on humanity, she gathered people to a carpark rooftop in the East End of London, for an encounter with the aerial powers of nature: “a show in the sky.”

Alexander mcqueen runway show