It’s a rare day when a writer gets to use the term ‘Glamazon’ outside of commercial catalogue copywriting, but in the case of Sarah Burton’s opulent warrior maidens at Alexander McQueen, what else could you do? If there was an air of Game of Thrones romanticism to Burton’s last collection, this one approached the same universe from a more ferocious, less tactile perspective. Models clad in harnesses, breast plates, sci-fi centurion helmets, and gold cuffs en masse stomped around a gladiator ring podium covered in a pattern of coloured sands, matching the red, black, white and grey of Burton’s Spring/Summer 2014 tone combo.
Maybe it was the frenzied synthesizer soundtrack, but there was a computer game vibe to the show, which was only enhanced by the collection’s aggressive vibrancy of bright red and blue feather skirts, digitalised African tribal prints, and razor sharp angular cut-outs. You wouldn’t want to run into these girls in a dark Parisian alley late at night, that’s for sure. Lee McQueen famously sought to empower women by addressing the factors in society, which he felt did the opposite. When he worked with brutal elements there always seemed to be a certain sensibility to the antagonism, which is practically impossible to imitate, and if Burton’s women sometimes came off a little emotionless it was almost certainly not the intention.
