A fantastical white line drawing of a twisting tree with creatures emerging from and around it decorates this black strapless dress. The digitally woven scene derives from a series of illustrations by Arthur Rackham for a 1908 publication of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. An expansive elm on the property of McQueen’s seventeenth-century East Sussex home was another source of inspiration to the collection. A branching headpiece of woven twine by Michael Schmidt references both the ancient elm and the stag that lives among it.

McQueen’s “croquet”-style dress shows an interlocking octagon and floral medallion pattern with international resonance. Known in Tibetan as kati rimo (“brocade design”), it was introduced from China through imported silks and adapted widely across Tibet (in goods such as Buddhist temple hangings and painted wooden trunks), as well as in Japan, where it became known as shokkō. McQueen’s affinity for Japanese dress and his personal adoption of Buddhism may have informed his awareness of this pattern.

This costume portrait typifies the turquerie taste that penetrated aspects of European art and culture during the eighteenth century. Jean-Baptiste Greuze has posed an unidentified sitter in an opulent ensemble, which contemporaneous audiences would recognize as à la sultane (“the sultana’s style”), referring to imperial consorts in the harem of an Ottoman sultan.

Known for Arabic, North African, and Western fusion electronic music, Natacha Atlas is photographed here in a kind of “Oriental tableau” inspired by Egyptian mid-twentieth-century photography and classic movies Youssef Nabil viewed growing up. Supine, sensuous, and headless, Atlas nevertheless confronts the “male gaze” implicit in Western fantasies of the Middle East that presuppose a state of feminine vulnerability and passivity. Rather, with her formidable, toned physique (Atlas performed as a belly dancer in London clubs earlier in her career), she controls her own sexuality.

Though McQueen lacked personal intimacy with Eye’s diverse cultural references, certain design details demonstrate his appreciation for their aesthetics: a red, white, and black striped miniskirt is reminiscent of French-influenced silks fashionable in eighteenth-century Turkey, while its top with partially detached sleeves emulates Turkish garment construction.

Eye presumes a dichotomy between the West/Christianity and East/Islam, perpetuating a reductive idea rooted in colonialism and art historical movements, such as turquerie, that Western art and dress hold a monopoly on influencing—and deriving inspiration from—outside cultures.

Aimé-Jules Dalou’s graceful female caryatids evoke the concept of women as columns, or pillars of strength, in his personification of continents (from left to right): the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The artist’s rendering illustrates French art’s roots in classical models, while reiterating the influence of French colonial expansion. Here, the artist reinforces cultural stereotypes begun in the seventeenth century and exemplifies nineteenth-century representations of the exotic, natural female constructed for the European male gaze.

The phoenix—a mythical bird that cyclically regenerates, symbolizing everlasting life, renewal, and the sun—was often used in revival styles in combination with other neoclassical motifs. An early-nineteenth-century blue-and-white textile draws upon this Greco-Roman imagery, as does McQueen’s long white dress with confronting birds beaded on a sheer back panel. Although show notes for the collection describe them as phoenixes, this motif has also been interpreted as the swan, a bird that likewise features prominently in classical mythology.

Gladiators, who fought in arenas as entertainment, inspired this silver look with a short, pleated skirt and belt, quilted with confronting hippocamps, Hellenistic seahorses who pulled Neptune’s chariot. Artists revived this mythological creature—a symbol of both the sea and the netherworld—during the Renaissance, as seen in a wine cistern illustrating scenes of the water god and his seahorse. A decorative and expertly constructed golden Neptune rides a hippocamp made in part of an exotic curling turban shell.

McQueen’s diaphanously draped green dress recalls the sleeves and torso of a belted Ionian chiton. Further revealing the body, a shaped sheer band of net along the waist and hips, encrusted with beads and crystals, resembles the lower portion of the molded cuirass (lorica) worn by the Roman military to protect their torsos. A similar bodice is depicted in Jacques-Antoine Beaufort’s The Oath of Brutus, on view on the adjacent, in which it is worn under a red cloak (or chlamys).