Sarah Burton is paving the way for fashion’s future
This might sound weird, but I was holding a paper doll dress earlier this week when I had an insight about fashion’s woeful impact on the environment. Fashion has the dubious honour of being the world’s second largest polluter after petrochemicals. On a bad day, it’s said to be the first. Yesterday, following a three-month investigation, the government wrote to leading UK fashion brands, including M&S (poor M&S, it’s one of the better-intentioned) to demand they address the situation.
Will Angry Government change anything?
As consumers we’re complicit in this, too.
We’ve grown used to fast cheap fashion. There remains a deep abiding suspicion in the country that spending a lot on individual items of clothing is a sign of vacuousness or vanity.
And guess what? We’re the highest spenders on throwaway clothing in Europe. Surely some connection?
Once upon a time, there were scores of luxury handbag houses making proper quality products in this country. Now we have just two of notable size: Mulberry and Anya Hindmarch, plus a cluster of niche labels such as Launer (the Queen’s favourite) and J&M Davidson. Only Mulberry manufactures (partly) in the UK.
But – and this is important – Hindmarch makes her top end, bespoke products here, because astonishingly, there are still pockets of highly specialised fashion skills in the UK. Erdem gets some of his embroideries done here. Roksanda and Emilia Wickstead produce some of their ready-to-wear here. Linton Tweed supplies all the best international fashion houses – from Chanel to Oscar de la Renta
– with ingenious weaves. Harris tweed is still revered and Scottish cashmere is the best in the world, even if some of the equipment up there isn’t able to produce the modern designs today’s fashion houses want. We (still) have amazing textile, print and fashion designers here, too. And some of the best wools in the world.
Except it’s all mostly on a miniature, sometimes rickety scale.
When I visited Linton in Carlisle a few years ago, I was taken round, not a gleaming, state-ofthe-art factory as would probably be the case in Italy, but a bunch of ramshackle portable cabin-type buildings, some with holes in the walls, stuffed with scraps of tweed to keep out the northern blast. Charming, but not exactly an emblem for Modern Britain. We could do worse than teach young (and older) people the skills to amp up these areas. The world will always want beautiful clothes.
So back to the paper doll, which was an exact replica of a finished dress that appeared on the Alexander Mcqueen catwalk 24 hours later. Sarah Burton, the creative director, makes them – the paper templates – every season, complete with accurately scaled-down floral prints, so that she can get a sense of what the finished garment will look like. No other ready-to-wear label in the world is cutting out paper doll clothes replications of its toiles before embarking on the full-sized version. For that matter, none is hand-painting poppies and meadowsweet on to their leather accessories.
Yet that’s precisely what some of Burton’s team – over 100 in all had come over from London to Paris prepare for the show – are doing. Painting, stitching and laddering (the vintage knits to make them look like lace) in a huge glass studio in the Marais.
A significant amount of what Burton does qualifies as couture, but she doesn’t want to do a separate couture collection. “I’d drive my team mad, probably, if that happened,” she laughed. There’s a long rail in the studio of finished pieces that she’s discarded: beautiful to you or me, but not quite what she had envisioned. “That turned out to be heavier than I wanted,” says Burton, of an extraordinary Joan of Arc black leather jacket with articulated elbows. The one that makes the show is white, with those hand-painted flowers.
In a far corner, Camilla Nickerson, Burton’s stylist, is fitting models, looping intricate chandelier earrings over their lobes and draping them in necklaces dripping with charms based on the ancient coins and flotsam Victorian mudlarks would find in the slurry of the Thames. Inspirational field trips are part of the Burton modus operandi. Last June, in time for the summer solstice, she and her design team went to the West Country. Her mood-boards are a lush grid of pictures of Victorian beauties and also of poppies and meadowsweet – which appear as new prints in the collection and on those painted boots and bags. “Can’t you just see Tess of the D’urbervilles in that?” asked Burton, pointing to an antique wedding dress adorning a mannequin in the centre of the studio. A printed chiffon interpretation overlaid with a canvas corset was in the show.
This is the antithesis of mindless, disposable clothes production and the prices are concomitantly sky high. The designer Alber Elbaz once told me that the customers of his deceptively simple, brilliantly cut silk dresses weren’t just paying for the one they took home with them, but all the reworked toile blueprints that had led to it. We’re talking about a relatively niche market. And don’t imagine that just because something has four zeros attached, it was sustainably made. Some brands spend so much on marketing, they’re squeezing their manufacturing margins as ruthlessly as the pile-it-high merchants. At Mcqueen, Burton is working to keep the integrity of her brand. She isn’t your indulged dauphine working in an ivory tower with no windows on to reality. She stitches all her whimsical and historical references into a coherent collection – shoes, bags, jewellery, perfume
– and sells it to the world. Later this autumn the label opens three floors of flagship on London’s Bond Street.
The model for mindful fashion design works for them. Can it be copied in the mass market? Not completely, obviously. But slower and less – and more transparent pricing (whether that reveals how much of the ticket pricing went on branding or how little reached the person who made it), are where we need to aim.