The Genius Next Door
By
ANDREW O’HAGAN August 22, 2014 9:00 amAugust 22, 2014 9:00 am
Shy, unassuming and nice, Sarah Burton, the Alexander McQueen designer, is everything that her magically haunting collections are not.
The word “nice” overcomes a multitude of human complications: People can be rich, so long as they’re nice; they can be lazy at school or useless at work, but if they’re nice, it doesn’t matter. Nice is not the same as “great” or “lovely” or even “sweet” — it’s a category of well-pitched, ordinary decency, and a person who has niceness has everything. To my mind, Sarah Burton is not merely one of the world’s greatest designers, she just happens to be the nicest, and she is about to enjoy the flowering of her life. Once thought of as the diligent one, the silent one, the reliable power behind the dazzle of Alexander McQueen, she has emerged as a person with a devastating music of her own. Season after season, she produces beautiful combinations of the gracious and the eerie, giving us worlds that we didn’t know until we saw them. And now, after some dark winters and several seasons in the media sun, Burton seems free somehow, and ready to stake her claim on the future.
It is four years since Alexander McQueen — or “Lee,” as he was called — who in addition to being Burton’s boss was also her beloved friend and mentor, committed suicide. She was heartbroken — she finished the collection, assumed the role of head designer (which she never sought) and, soon after, in the hot glare of speculation, made the wedding dress of the decade, for the Duchess of Cambridge. To do it all, to bear it, and still be nice, is to exhibit a set of capabilities that adds even more to an already first-rate talent. I didn’t know Sarah Burton, but we got together over several weeks for this story, at her studio, at restaurants, backstage at one of her shows and, finally, at her house in North London. The first time I met her, I noticed how bitten her nails were, how self-doubting she was and how vulnerable. Yet over the weeks, her strength emerged as it does in her work: determined, sure-footed, risky, humorous and ready to open her soul in order to make contact with people. She hadn’t given an interview for almost two years before this one and even then had said very little, and she found herself speaking in a new way. A portrait emerged of a brilliant woman whose nature has been tested under severe conditions. And yet the person I met could laugh for England, making life stories, and her own life story, into an elegant aria of dreaming and believing. There is depth to her niceness, and a niceness to her depth, which has not only quadrupled her company’s fortunes, but which promises a wealth of great work to come.
Burton grew up outside Manchester. Her father was an accountant and her mother was a music teacher. She has four siblings. When she described her childhood to me she spoke a lot about education, about her father feeling that knowledge was something “nobody can take away from you.” On weekends, she and her brothers and sisters would be taken to places such as the Manchester Art Gallery, where she remembers doting on the pre-Raphaelite paintings. When we talked about influences, she sometimes glanced over her own personal things, as if she might always be haunted by the things that once haunted Lee McQueen. “I don’t have that darkness,” she said to me one morning as buses roared past her office on Clerkenwell Road. “I’m not haunted or sad. I don’t have that story in my youth.”
“But some artists are lured towards their opposite,” I said.
“That’s right. Some people think the pre-Raphaelites show a rather insipid way of representing beauty. But the painting of Ophelia [by John Everett Millais] is dark and beautiful at the same time.”
“She’s being pulled under by what Shakespeare called ‘her weedy trophies,’ ” I said. “Literally, being sunk and drowned by her dress. That’s not going to happen to you, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “Though I couldn’t always swear to it.”
“Who is your hero?” I asked.
“I think my dad is my hero,” she said. “He works so hard, and he never lies. He believes in family. He’s always been totally fair. And he treats everybody in the family equally.”
I looked for the sources of Burton’s memories of childhood, and the pictures she looked at in Manchester offer a host of beautiful, melancholy signals in abundant, colorful cloth: in “La Mort d’Arthur” by James Archer, a woman and a ghost grieve at the feet of the magical king. “The Lady of Shalott” by William Holman Hunt is drawn from Tennyson’s poem about a woman devoted to her loom and her weave who makes a fateful journey to the outside world. Yet Burton says she had a wonderfully happy childhood. The darkness was stored, and she grew up among the flora and fauna of the North — the windswept moors, the Pennine hills, the long green valleys they call the dales — which finds its way relentlessly into the best of her designs. “I’ve always loved nature,” she says. “I grew up in the countryside, and when I was a child I loved to paint and draw — that was my first love, actually. Eventually I was drawing clothes, but at first it was flowers and vegetables. So often we were outside, playing.”
“What was play for you?” I asked.
“A lot of dressing up.”
“Were you the boss?”
“Yes, always,” Burton said, laughing. “My poor younger sister, she’d get the not-so-good outfits. Fashion wasn’t something in the psyche. I learned very early on you had to go with your heart and it doesn’t matter what people say. My job is quite fearful — I don’t shout the loudest, and I’m quite shy, which was why I was reluctant to throw myself into the public eye. I love beauty, craftsmanship, storytelling and romance, and I probably don’t have the armor to survive the relentless competition that exists in this particular world. But I have my own toughness.”
You see it in her collections. There is nothing fey about them, and her bold, searching intelligence is everywhere. What she makes are couture works of art, full of a wonderful dreamlike phantasmagoria. As if the material, the organza, the silk and the leather, was alive not only to history itself but to her own personal history, the dark and the light. Sometimes her stylistic similarities to McQueen have been levied as a criticism against Burton. “What do people think I was for all those years, the cleaner?” She helped him draw out the savage brilliance that first made the house famous. For such a retiring person, Burton had no problem journeying with him into the madness of the macabre, the rigid body-contoured corsets, the gold-painted fox-skeleton wrap, the bondage pieces, the kimono-style parachute, the antlered bridal gowns. She helped give birth to these designs and is said to have kept the show on the road through many difficult episodes. But she’s ultimately a different kind of artist. It’s hard to see her sharing the dark roots of McQueen’s fetishistic damage obsession. (His famous “Highland r*pe” show, which McQueen said was about the r*pe of Scotland by England, took place before she joined the company.)
Burton’s darkness is more masked, almost more surprising. It comes unbidden from a place of relative personal optimism and sunniness. Her hauntings are more romantic, and the materials she uses are increasingly different, more celebratory of enduring life and returning nature, despite the brutality at nature’s core. I’d also argue that a larger sense of wearability, and of lightness, of small detail and cool craftsmanship, has matched the house to a new and bigger audience. She is fiercely loyal to Lee McQueen, a fact which brought her, several times during our interviews, past the brink of tears. She loves who he was and wants the company he founded to continually honor his memory, but she has to move on. The work already has moved on, and she knows that is what McQueen himself would have demanded. There is now a feeling, I detect, that she is ready to let him rest, no matter how hard that is. All the great houses had to move beyond their founding geniuses: Coco Chanel died, one must remember, and so did Cristobal Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. Burton took over under traumatic circumstances, and it has taken her this long to be able to truly speak. It took a little work but eventually she opened up about some of the difficulties she’d had. We sat at a large table in her workshop with dresses hanging on every side, organza puffballs, feathered slips. She spoke with love but also with an essential determination.
