Paris Fashion Week: Sarah Burton keeps Alexander McQueen’s vision alive in the #metoo era

Lee Alexander McQueen died in 2010, but not before he had predicted the trajectory of fashion this decade with extraordinary accuracy.

He believed fiercely in fashion as armour for women, had an unsettling instinct to needle into the dark heart of sexual politics, and an impulse to celebrate female strength.

It is uncanny, in hindsight, to note the extent to which McQueen predicted a reckoning in gender politics that came to pass years later. He foresaw the #MeToo era that has reverberated through fashion in the slogan T-shirts and hemline debates of recent years. Sarah Burton, who has kept the Alexander McQueen brand alive and vibrant without the man himself for nine years, is a force of nature of a quite different kind.

Backstage after her Paris fashion week show, held in the same 17th arrondissement lycée where McQueen staged his Hitchcock Heroines show in 2005, she talked passionately about the “deeply personal” roots of a show grounded in the fabric mills and raw landscape of the Derbyshire countryside where she grew up. “It’s armour, but it’s not literal,” she said. “Lee started on Savile Row and McQueen is always about tailoring for me. The jacket is at the heart of what we do. Tailoring is about strength, but it’s also about being held.”