After 13 years at the helm of the brand, Sarah Burton leaves the creative direction of Alexander McQueen. This was announced last night by the Kering group, the company to which the British brand belongs, in a statement: «I am very proud of everything I have done and of the incredible team that makes up Alexander McQueen. “They are my family and this has been my home for the last 26 years,” explains Burton, who joined the brand as an intern in 1996 and was later named head of design. After McQueen’s death in 2010, Kering decided that his former right-hand woman would become his successor. “I want to thank Francois Henri Pinault for his trust in me by offering me this incredible opportunity, but above all thank Lee Alexander McQueen, who taught me so much,” Burton continued in the statement.
During his thirteen years at the helm, Burton continued to develop some of his mentor’s obsessions (Gothic, Victorian clothing, the aesthetics of British rural communities…) but in a much less spectacular and more realistic way, with garments made in his most with tailoring techniques and full of details but adapted to the female body. When she took charge of McQueen, Burton became one of the very few women who at that time commanded the design of a major luxury brand; “There is no archetypal woman, there are many women, even in the same woman. We see it every day on the street. Luckily, conventions about what to wear no longer exist. In the same week we can express ourselves in a different way with very different clothes,” she explained in an interview with S Moda.
Fall-Winter 2019 Fashion Show
His most notable achievement for the general public was the design of Kate Middleton’s wedding dress in 2011 (shortly afterwards he received the medal of the Order of the British Empire), but the truth is that Burton, always maintaining a low profile, was more than a decade fulfilling one of Lee McQueen’s wishes: to help young creatives without resources. He created dozens of projects at the Sarabande Foundation (which Lee created shortly before his death) and was actively involved in various creative associations in deprived areas of the United Kingdom.
Spring-summer parade0 2023
Last year, speculation about Burton’s departure began when Kering appointed a new CEO for McQueen, Gianfilippo Testa, who had just held the sales direction of another of the group’s brands, Gucci: “we want to express our immense gratitude to Sarah for writing such an important chapter in the history of the house,” Testa declares in the statement. Despite having grown by 20% on average annually after the pandemic and having recorded some super sales, such as sports shoes, the brand has not reached the billion euros annually, which some of its competitors within the group have far exceeded, such as Saint Laurent or Gucci itself. Hence, it is considered with a turn by Alexander McQueen towards the creation of a greater range of accessories to reach this figure.
Sarah Burton’s last show will be on September 30 during Paris Fashion Week. Kering announces that it will be known who will succeed her in office “in due course”
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