After her mentor and boss Alexander McQueen died in 2010, Sarah Burton took over as creative director and turned the house into one of today's most successful luxury names. CathyHoryn reports
British designer Sarah Burton was a student at Central Saint Martins, the London arts-and-design college, she asked a teacher, Simon Ungless, to recommend her for an internship at Alexander McQueen. This was something Ungless could easily do: He had worked with McQueen on his earliest collections, including “Taxi Driver,” his first after leaving school.
Nonetheless, he declined to recommend her. Past interns would go to McQueen’s studio; he’d let them wear the clothes, and “suddenly they thought they were McQueen,” Ungless said. But when she asked again, he figured that “Sarah is a worker, and she’s never going to be slipping on that jacket from ‘Highland Rape’ and going out to a club. So I called Lee,” he said, using the designer’s first name.
That journey was harder than anyone could have imagined. McQueen was a world-builder who approached every show with clarity of purpose. “He knew exactly what he wanted,” Burton says, and he never allowed himself to think that anyone’s opinion was more important than his own. But Burton was made of softer material. She didn’t realize how much emotional courage it took to ignore other people’s opinions about the direction of the house. “I was very much a yes-person.
Burton was the only assistant McQueen ever had, and in the beginning, at Hoxton Square, it was the just the two of them making a collection with the help of Verkade and interns. Trained on Savile Row, McQueen had the highest standards of English tailoring at his command, but he also felt free to break those rules. And he could cut a new garment with amazing speed. Burton once said he was so quick in a fitting that “he made you feel like you might as well pack your bags and go home.
McQueen’s death turned everything Burton knew upside down. “The world that I grew up in was Lee,” she says. “He was this person you just wanted to make happy. He was a genius. And when he died, I thought it was over. Then you think,Am I confident enough to think I can? Can there be creativity without the whirlwind he made? It made you question everything.” Burton knew how to research and build a narrative. She shared McQueen’s love of nature and Britishness.
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