This painting’s Depression-era seaside setting, acid colors, and jumbled bodies suggest frenetic derby scenes from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Deliverance, McQueen’s collection inspired by the 1969 film. The designer translated 1930s-style bias-cut dresses into looks that include competitor numbers. Jersey dresses worn by models stampeding to cross a finish line onstage represented a notable departure from McQueen’s signature tailoring. These knit-elastic ensembles allow the wearer an athlete’s freedom of movement.

McQueen based his Deliverance collection on director Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which follows impoverished couples competing to win a dance marathon set in a Santa Monica dance hall during the Great Depression. The bleak reality of the Depression referenced by the film—and some of the Americana-inspired looks in McQueen’s runway show—are captured by these period photographs.

Deliverance was a live rendition, choreographed by Michael Clark, of the Great Depression–era dance marathon depicted in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In McQueen’s portrayal, the film’s “dance to the death” becomes a poignant metaphor for the experience of working in fashion. Despair and exhaustion—of the Depression, of dance marathons, of designers—palpably accelerate until the performance culminates in a dancer collapsed lifelessly at center stage.

This black-feathered “raven cape” foreshadows the deadly finale of Deliverance’s dance-hall performance. Ravens, like some other birds of prey, are traditionally associated with death. McQueen’s use of such memento mori devices connects his work with other art historical representations of life’s transience—and preciousness. For instance, in Jean-Baptiste Auguste Clésinger’s vanitas, an owl peering at a crowned human skull symbolizes the futility of material wealth in the face of fate.

McQueen interpreted the corrida from an outsider’s perspective, but followed in the footsteps of Spanish artists Francisco de Goya and Pablo Picasso, both of whom drew upon the bullfight in their own practices. Goya’s depiction of a Spanish knight slain by a bull comes from his series La Tauromaquia (Bullfighting), published in 1816, which offers a visual history of bullfighting in Spain, and directly inspired Pablo Picasso’s 1959 series La Tauromaquia. Though both artists were devoted to the pastime, they also reflected on its mortal aspects.

In addition to the Spanish bullfight, McQueen’s collection was also inspired by the power, beauty, and grace of flamenco. A black ensemble reimagines the dancer’s dress, here paired with a rigid corset with lacing detail. An asymmetrical ruffled skirt insinuates the movement of a traditional tiered flamenco costume. A beaded hat with curving horns by Michael Schmidt situates this look in the corrida, or bullfight, personifying the equally powerful and graceful movements in the ring.

McQueen explores ideas of waste and recycling with a black coatdress conceived to resemble a trash bag; though made of a polyamide/polyurethane-coated plain-weave textile and expertly shaped, its “bin liner” reference is overt. Similarly, artist Rodney McMillian uses post-consumer materials found in secondhand shops. An old bedsheet—synonymous with the body and the bed, a place for love, rest, and even death—was painted with latex, cut down the middle, and stitched back together.

A textile imagined by designer and early McQueen collaborator Simon Ungless, and first used in The Birds (Spring/Summer 1995), makes its return in a red dress. Woven with a radiating houndstooth design (a nod to Dior) that transforms into flying birds, the pattern reimagines the graphic work of M. C. Escher. The textile also recalls the natural phenomenon of murmuration, in which large numbers of starlings fly in formation, morphing between chaos and order—amorphous aerial patterns captured by photographer Richard Barnes.
 

Through sea trade, fine cottons were exported from India to European markets, as in an 1820s white silver-embroidered dress festooned with pleated pink accents. These luxury fabrics were equally prized domestically, such as in a man’s cotton waist sash (patka) at left with gold embroidery and iridescent beetle-wing (elytra) sequins. This tradition of metallic embroidery is echoed in a white McQueen dress with a mid-twentieth-century hourglass silhouette and appliqués of gold-embroidered birds and branches, a look symbolizing the girl emerging from the tree.

A black McQueen dress with a high empire waist alludes to the prevailing silhouette of the Regency period; acorns, a symbol of stability common in British decorative arts, dangle from the torso. A nearby 1820s silk gauze dress, also in black, features a pattern of anchors and crowns celebrating the might of Britain’s navy, the largest in the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.