After 26 years, Sarah Burton is leaving the British luxury fashion house Alexander McQueen. When the former McQueen intern took over the helm of the brand in 2010 after the death of the designer of the same name, she was faced with an almost insurmountable challenge. Succeeding a designer as beloved and glorified as Lee Alexander McQueen is no easy feat – and yet the consensus within the atelier was that Burton was the only one capable of succeeding McQueen, according to The Cut magazine. The coming years should confirm this, because not many designers would have taken on this responsibility with more sensitivity, skill and pride than Burton did.
With her, another era of the fashion house is coming to an end, because her successor will most likely only know the legacy of the brand and the designer McQueen from stories, books and documentaries.
Where did Burton begin and where did McQueen end?
Burton shared McQueen’s love of Britain’s nature and history, but while McQueen himself often plunged his fashion into darkness, Burton brought a lighter, softer touch to the brand’s renowned tailoring. It was difficult to tell, especially at the beginning, where McQueen ended and Burton began, and yet over time Burton transformed the late designer’s only gothic warriors, as the press liked to call his models, into a gentler, more romantic version of themselves .While it’s impossible to talk about Burton without necessarily referencing McQueen, it would be doing the designer an injustice not to acknowledge that the brand has continued to blossom under her romantic signature and, one might say, emerge from obscurity is.
It’s a path that Burton has already set – perhaps unconsciously, perhaps intentionally – with her first solo collection for the brand. The Spring/Summer 2011 show opened with a model dressed all in white, her eyes obscured by contact lenses and her face framed by braids. She was dressed in a tailcoat. “The tailcoat is a quintessential McQueen piece, but in this case it was softer, its edges were raw, and the hard, pointed shoulders that are another McQueen trademark were slashed and loosened,” fashion critic Tim Blanks wrote for Vogue Runway .
While her early collections in particular were characterized by a level of attention to detail, tailoring and scale almost comparable to couture – the ten Anglican Church-inspired looks that Burton is presenting for autumn/winter 2013 are said to have taken two weeks per outfit, according to Blanks , – the designer turned increasingly to more commercial collections over the years.
The birth of a new British luxury brand
With an increasing focus on wearable fashion, the once central theme of storytelling has increasingly faded into the background. While McQueen was a dreamer, it had always been Burton’s job to translate his visions and anchor them in reality. When McQueen made Burton his head of design while she was still alive, one of her duties was to translate each season’s runway looks into commercial styles, The Cut wrote in a profile of Burton earlier this year. While the label once particularly appealed to industry insiders, fashion fans and art students – obsessed with McQueen’s creative genius – under Burton the brand evolved into a global luxury brand that combined commerce with exceptional craftsmanship without losing its identity . So it’s hardly surprising that Burton’s leadership of McQueen didn’t necessarily give the brand the same media buzz as her mentor, but it did keep the cash registers ringing for a while.
Although the parent company Kering, which took over the McQueen brand in 2001, does not explicitly break down its sales, according to Vogue Business, it was said to have been 220 million euros in 2014. The industry magazine refers to the analyst Édouard Aubin from the investment firm Morgan Stanley. According to him, sales increased to 830 million euros in 2022, compared to 758 million euros in 2021.
In the first half of 2023, the tide appears to have turned for the French luxury goods group Kering SA, which is currently carrying out all sorts of restructuring within the group. Sales for the entire company increased only slightly and Kering’s so-called “Other Houses” division, which includes Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, recorded a five percent decline in sales to 1.9 billion euros in the first half of the year compared to the previous year. Kering’s financial report in July nevertheless emphasized that McQueen’s ready-to-wear had achieved “good results.”
Whether these “good results” weren’t good enough in the end, whether Burton’s farewell was related to the numerous changes within the company or whether it was perhaps the designer herself who said goodbye to her “family” after 26 years, like she did at McQueen team mentioned in a statement published by Kering will probably remain speculation. It would be desirable, however, that her legacy, like that of her former mentor, boss and friend, would not be forgotten, but rather find its way into the history books of Alexander McQueen.