Among the McQueen looks inspired by the eighteenth century is this black and red dress with long, draped box pleats at the front of the body, inspired by the back of a robe à la française. A reference to the stomacher, which typically accessorizes the center-front of period gowns, appears at the V-shaped back of the dress, completing the designer’s vision for backward construction.
In Flemish court painter Frans Pourbus II’s portrait of a young King Louis XIII of France, the artist renders the monarch with exquisite attention to detail, especially in his starched lace collar, slashed satin doublet and sleeves, and gold scrolling-vine embroidery. A similar attention to detail is found in this McQueen white dress from Sarabande, which includes a small ruff at the neck and elaborate gold beading throughout the chest in a similar pattern around a mirrored red “cQ” in reference to the McQueen logo.
McQueen’s Irere collection was strongly informed by the film The Mission (1986) about late-sixteenth-century Christian missionaries in South America. An ensemble with a quilted-leather doublet strung with rosaries is similar to a 1580 print of a lady by Hendrik Goltzius. A perforated and embossed leather jacket also recalls the fashion for slashing in menswear, illustrated in Goltzius’s print of a Polish nobleman (see both prints on the wall to the left).
By understanding the trades of tailoring and dressmaking, McQueen could masterfully deconstruct clothing. A tweed and leather ensemble from Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (Fall/Winter 2002–3) subverts outerwear, underwear, and accessories in a jacket tailored with a belted bra and harness, with lacing highlighting the back of the jacket (like a spine) and the sides of a pair of jeans. A body-conscious dress from Scanners of wrapped bands of silk with zippers at the side seams reimagines dresses made famous by Azzedine Alaïa, whom McQueen greatly admired.
Complex garment patterns emerge in McQueen’s dress designs, informed both by his training and his tactile sensitivity to cloth. This grouping of dresses made after McQueen’s appointment to Givenchy attest to his skills in lightness acquired while at the couture house. Draping forms the basis of a pink dress from Irere (Spring/Summer 2003), while a black dress with insets and godets from Pantheon ad Lucem (Fall/Winter 2004–5) and a lace look from the pre–Fall/Winter 2007–8 collection demonstrate his proficiency in generating sinuous movement around the body.
Despite portraying humanity’s Atlantean return to the sea (a comment on global warming echoed by Andreas Gursky’s monumental photograph documenting coastlines, also from 2010), the overall tone of Plato’s Atlantis was not pessimistic. Rather, the collection affirmed interconnectedness and circularity. Two dresses with blue mandala-like print designs evoke the cosmic ocean and water's life-giving power.
Plato’s Atlantis presented distinctive, conceptual footwear designs, including the now-iconic “Armadillo” boot. The collection’s “Titanic” shoe design with “Meccano” heels (shown here in a black ballerina style) references the famous ocean liner sunk by an iceberg, a reminder of nature’s might as humanity faces rising seas.
McQueen’s explorations of natural selection inspired studies of the beauty found in strength. Plato’s Atlantis references snakes, moths, stingrays, and jellyfish, celebrating nature’s protective camouflage and evolutionary defense mechanisms. The collection’s digitally collaged textiles capture meticulous likenesses of land, sky, and sea animals, recalling life-casting techniques used in lead-glazed earthenware to achieve remarkable animal facsimiles.
Inspired by European mourning practices, McQueen balanced the feminine form with the grandeur of decay in two looks of delicately ruched black net over white that accentuates the body while mimicking “crape,” textured silks fashionable for grieving. McQueen also referenced flowers, seen here in muted pink shoes with blooms at the heel. Similarly, Dirck de Bray’s still life depicts wildflowers picked at the height of their beauty, with some beginning to wilt, a candid reminder of the passage of time.
This black lace dress with patterns of flowers in vases features wide hips, a silhouette referencing eighteenth-century styles, which appear throughout Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). The film follows the exploits of Redmond Barry, who ascends to become Lord Barry Lyndon before fate ultimately unravels his self-styled transformation. The fatalistic romanticism in Barry Lyndon and evoked in the Sarabande collection underscores shared artistic proficiencies of Kubrick and McQueen, including exceptional craftsmanship and capacity for world-making.