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Collection review: Alexander McQueen Aw17 - The Open College of the Arts

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Collection review: Alexander McQueen Aw17


Last February I worked on the Autumn/Winter ’17 collection for Alexander McQueen, developing textiles and embroideries. The great environment and creative designers with different backgrounds, nationalities and skills make the studio space a very welcome and inspiring place to work.
Like every beginning of a collection lots of exciting research including medieval imagery, photographic research of the British seaside, images of landscapes and piles of crafted pieces and materials were put together on boards, waiting there to come together and tell a new story through the collection to come.

Alexander McQueen’s creative director Sarah Burton, who regularly draws on British heritage, ancient traditions and craft, took her team to the Shetlands Isles for inspiration this season. They also stopped in Cornwall and got inspired by the light, big blue skies, the pagan landscapes and traditional crafts of the locals, before stumbling across the spiritual “Cloutie” Trees. A place of pilgrimage, their branches are ornamented with bright and colourful ribbons and treasures, which represent the hopes and wishes of those who tied them on the tree flying in the wind. That inspiration translated into a collection of dresses with long colourful trailing strings of undone thread and raw edges that were coming from each embroidered patch. Another series of silk dresses engineered and printed in cross-stitch squares with lace borders and a richly worked jacquard with panels of medieval flowers and decorative damasks, defined by red feather stitching, explores the idea of piece and patched work


The collection included a series of leather dresses and coats featuring V-stitches at the seams in black, red and white that took inspiration on medieval needlework samplers from XVI and XVII Century. In the textiles team, rich tapestry dresses were patched together and ornamented in embroideries depicting meadow flowers, wild strawberries, herbs, deer and hare, birds… all left undone and with a riot of colourful fringes. My favourite pieces were a series of gowns made of silk tulle that were encrusted with black and silver beads and metal charms, with cuffs and hemlines finished in a feathered froth.

One of the main embroidery designs developed for the collection was inspired on a beautiful V&A Mediaeval sample, that had writing on it, and was embroidered ‘Lee was borne’, the design was developed into different tones and used on a series of dresses that had raw edges and fringes, making the pieces look unfinished.

You can find a bit more about the collection here. Where do you find your design inspiration?
Images: © Alexander McQueen


Posted by author: Pere Bruach

3 thoughts on “Collection review: Alexander McQueen Aw17

  • I would love to know more about the process of how the designers and the people who actually make these garments work together

  • Thanks for sharing this insights on the process. It must be very inspiring to work as a team to mutually inspire each other. I get a strong impression that the development process is taken seriously at AM, which for me lends authority to the processes we are being taught at level 1 textiles courses. This process is what has really intrigued (and sometimes frustrated) me at the textiles degree. Learning to let go of preconceived ideas and learnt techniques and to instead start with research and development of ideas before to actual making.

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