Spring 2012 Runway | Sarah Burton Breathes Less Psychological Terror, More Goddess Power into McQueen Women

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Sarah Burton’s Women

Both Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel and Sarah Burton’s collection for McQueen paid homage to women of the sea in Paris yesterday. There’s a key difference in the women, however. ‘Lagerfeld’s models were nymphs; Sarah Burton’s were goddesses,’ writes Tim Blanks for Style.com.

Not only are the Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen women more powerful than Lagerfeld’s at Chanel — goddesses rather than nymphs — they are shedding their McQueen ambivalence about female power and its impact on the lives of men.

Still bound with fetish details and an inherent female eroticism, the Sarah Burton women are lighter, even romantic at moments and more human than animal. McQueen’s women hovered more obviously between both worlds — torn creatures in the mind of the man who invented them.

Sarah Burton is ‘hot-wired into the core of McQueen’ writes Blanks, without the need to disrupt the beauty of the vision. The two spirits are indeed intertwined, but it is Burton who will unleash McQueen’s womanly aesthetic fearlessly.

There is no designer more relevant to the concept of 21st century Phoenix Rising than the Burton/McQueen duo vision. It is Burton who will make me not afraid of the undercurrent that almost always pervaded a McQueen collection — the desire to drive a spear into the heart of unbearable beauty and sensuality. Anne

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