Sarabande is the twenty-ninth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, released for the Spring/Summer 2007 season of his eponymous fashion house. Sarabande was an exploration of fragility and decaying grandeur expressed through floral motifs. It was primarily inspired by Barry Lyndon (1975), a film set in the eighteenth century and known for its themes of fatalism and romanticism. Elements of the traditional clothing of Mexico and Spain appeared alongside an exaggerated hourglass silhouette updated from the Edwardian era. The palette was muted, with washed-out dark colours, off whites, and muted pinks and purples, reflecting traditional English mourning colours.
The runway show was staged on 6 October 2006 at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris. The set was designed to resemble an abandoned wood-floored theatre with a round stage. A chamber orchestra was seated on the stage in two groups facing one another, with a large glass chandelier hung between them. The orchestra played a new version of a sarabande by George Frideric Handel known for appearing in Barry Lyndon; the collection takes its name from the musical style. Forty-six looks were presented. The last dress was covered with silk and fresh flowers, which, having been hastily sewn on, began falling off on the runway, creating what critics regarded as a moment of serendipitous beauty.
Response to Sarabande was positive, with reviewers feeling that it was a successful follow-up to McQueen's previous season. It is recalled as one of his defining collections. Academic analysis has considered the collection's influences and the floral finale dresses. Items from the collection have appeared in exhibitions like the retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.
Background British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was known for his imaginative, sometimes controversial designs, and dramatic fashion shows. Over the course of his career, which lasted from 1992 until his death in 2010, he explored a broad range of ideas and themes, particularly sexuality, death, violence, romanticism, and historicism. He learned tailoring as an apprentice on Savile Row and dressmaking as head designer at French fashion house Givenchy. Although he worked in ready-to-wear – clothing produced for retail sale – his showpiece designs featured a degree of craftsmanship that verged on haute couture. In 2000, McQueen sold 51 per cent of his company to Italian fashion house Gucci but retained creative control.
McQueen's personal fixations and interests were a throughline in his career, and he returned to certain ideas and visual motifs repeatedly. His collections were historicist, in that he adapted historical designs and narratives, and self-referential, in that he revisited and reworked ideas between collections. He looked to the arts for inspiration, drawing on photographs, paintings, and films. He incorporated his love of the natural world throughout his career with organic materials and visual references. Birds and feathers were an ever-present theme. His favourite flowers, roses, recurred in various forms. They appealed to him in part because of their multi-faceted cultural associations: romance and beauty on the one hand, and pain, blood, and violence on the other. McQueen frequently played with similarly contrasting themes in his work.
He was also known for playing with the silhouette by cutting or structuring garments to produce unusual shapes. In Pantheon ad Lucem (Autumn/Winter 2004), for example, he emphasised the hips, but also showed cinched waists and padded jackets. A number of McQueen's collections included variations on a moulded leather bodice that strictly defined and sculpted the torso, all based on life casts of model Laura Morgan. The first of these was in No. 13 (Spring/Summer 1999), followed by It's Only a Game (Spring/Summer 2005) and In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692 (Autumn/Winter 2007).
In the years preceding Sarabande, McQueen had reached a stage of exhaustion with his career and the fashion industry, at one point saying, "I go in, I do my business, do the parties, and leave." The collections he presented in 2005, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Autumn/Winter 2005) and Neptune (Spring/Summer 2006), were criticised for being dull and commercial. Although the previous season's collection, The Widows of Culloden (Autumn/Winter 2006), had been seen as a return to form, McQueen remained under pressure to make sales. In 2004, the Gucci group, which owns the McQueen brand, had advised their subsidiary fashion houses that they needed to break even by 2007, so producing a collection that could perform commercially was of utmost importance.
Concept and creative process Inspiration
Sarabande (Spring/Summer 2007) is the twenty-ninth collection McQueen designed for his eponymous fashion house. The concept was an exploration of fragility and decaying grandeur expressed through floral motifs. The name was taken from a style of music called the sarabande, which originated in sixteenth century colonial Latin America before being adopted in a slower form in Europe. According to Sarah Burton, McQueen's right-hand woman, the collection changed drastically during the working process, to a degree she considered unusual. Some items were discarded, while others, such as the tailcoats, were reworked. McQueen later described his work on the collection and its predecessor as his "second wind in fashion", saying that he was enjoying the process more than he had been.
Like much of McQueen's work, Sarabande drew on McQueen's favourite art. The collection was primarily inspired by Barry Lyndon, a 1975 film by Stanley Kubrick set in the eighteenth century, known for its themes of fatalism and romanticism. It also drew on the life and aesthetics of Italian socialite Luisa Casati (1881–1957), who was known as a muse for artists, going so far as to declare that she wanted to be "a living work of art." A 1908 portrait of her by Giovanni Boldini, which shows her in a black dress and large matching hat, was especially formative. The designs were also reminiscent of the costumes from the 1971 film Death in Venice, set in the European Belle Époque; it was one of McQueen's favourites. Early looks blended elements of the sailor suit worn by Tadzio, a young boy whose beauty is central to the film, and the black-and-white outfits worn by his mother. Sarabande also drew on Spanish painter Francisco Goya and the traditional clothing of Mexico and Spain.
Collection The palette for Sarabande reflected the clothing worn during traditional English phases of mourning: shades of black, grey, and off-white, as well as dusky hues of pink, lavender, and mauve, which the Edwardians called "ashes of roses". This gave the collection an antiquated aesthetic, which McQueen compared to hand-tinted sepia prints by Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
McQueen often revisited and refined ideas from earlier shows, and Sarabande was no exception. His characteristic tailoring appeared in slimline tailored suits, fitted riding jackets, and narrow dresses. Other designs showcased his interest in adapting and modernising historical styles. References to clothing of the eighteenth century and the Edwardian era were mediated through McQueen's love of the costume design from Barry Lyndon. The historicist designs were updated with modern flourishes such as asymmetry, especially a suite of high-low skirts with hems cut at calf length in the front and left long in the back.
Sarabande relied heavily on nature imagery for effect, especially English garden flowers, a contrast to McQueen's usual preference for depicting the natural world untouched by humanity. His depiction of florals for this collection was somewhat morbid. A few months after the show, he told Harper's Bazaar that he had been thinking of a series of photographs of dying fruit by his friend Sam Taylor-Wood: "Things rot. It was all about decay. I used flowers because they die." Some garments had embroidery of flowers, while some had full silk or fresh flowers stitched to them. A few dresses had petals trapped beneath chiffon, a style which evoked designs by Koji Tatsuno, a mentor of McQueen's. McQueen referenced Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga in a set of dresses with puff skirts, especially Look 43, which has a three-tiered puff skirt that author Judith Watt described as "resembling an overblown exotic fungi". Birds and feathers appeared in delicate prints and embroidery, reflecting the ornithological art of John James Audubon. One gown was covered entirely in feathers.
The collection focused on an exaggerated Edwardian hourglass silhouette with cinched waists and emphasised hips, which McQueen felt enhanced the natural sensuality of the female body. There were several "infanta" dresses, which have tight bodices and wide-hipped skirts; Balenciaga originated this style, drawing on Spanish court costume of the seventeenth century. For example, Look 18, a black lace dress with broad hips, echoes the wide-hipped silhouette common in the eighteenth century. The historical style was created by panniers, a type of stiff framework worn beneath skirts, but McQueen's version uses soft padding instead. Other historicist flourishes include lace, corsets, and puffed sleeves and shoulders.
Because of its multi-faceted inspiration, many elements can be seen as a reference to more than one source. The collection's ruffled shirts resembled men's shirts of the eighteenth century, as seen in Barry Lyndon, but were also reminiscent of traditional Spanish and Mexican clothing, which often feature ruffles and flounces. Sarabande revisited ideas from McQueen's earlier collection The Dance of the Twisted Bull (Spring/Summer 2002), which had been heavily inspired by Spanish matadors. Sarabande featured a short series of black-and-white ensembles with ruffled shirts and embroidery reminiscent of Spanish blackwork lace. Two of these had tight cropped trousers like the matador's taleguilla, and one had beadwork that visually resembled the matador's traditional braces.
McQueen worked with other creatives to produce things outside his area of expertise for runway shows, relying on longtime collaborators Philip Treacy and Shaun Leane for headpieces and jewellery, respectively. For Sarabande, Treacy created exaggerated hats in black silk, evoking oversized roses or the shape of the chaperon from the Jan van Eyck painting known as Portrait of a Man in a Turban (1433), which was beloved by McQueen's friend and muse Isabella Blow. Jewellery for the collection was fairly minimal. Look 21 featured a silver choker with rose thorns, drawing on similar items he had created for McQueen's Dante (Autumn/Winter 1996). There were also earrings and chokers with cameos and hair, reflecting Victorian mourning jewellery, which often included hair as a memento of the deceased. Early in his career, McQueen had referenced this practice by encasing locks of his own hair in the labels and linings of some garments.
Showpiece ensembles
Look 39 was a cream-coloured leather dress, hand-painted with birds and floral designs. Its rigid torso was moulded from Morgan's life casts, complete with breast shapes, abdominal muscles, and navel. Watt described the shape as having a "raw sexuality", tempered by the delicate paintwork.
Look 26, a short white dress, was paired on the runway with a take on a mantilla, a traditional Spanish veil, in grey rhinestone-accented lace. It was draped over a high flower crown and wrapped around the body like a cloak. Curator Kate Bethune found it reminiscent of a 1922 portrait of Casati by Ignacio Zuloaga. Katherine Knox wrote that it was "McQueen's take on a Victorian bride", but with a Gothic undertone that suggested "something sinister lurking beneath the bridal veil".