‘At the beginning, taking on the job was something that I didn’t want to do, because he was such a genius, and you can never pretend to be him. He was so inspiring and funny, and an incredible man, that I was very afraid of taking the job,’ she told Hintmag. ‘But now I look back and I’m very glad that I did, because it’s almost kept the studio alive in his spirit. It’s kept the team together. What did he work so hard for for all those years if it was just going to disappear?’
Burton, speaking in a video produced to mark the opening of McQueen’s first Beijing store, also described the laborious method behind the production of the mosaic gowns from autumn-winter 2011.
‘We had to mould a porcelain structure. We took a cast of the body, then poured the porcelain so it actually fitted the body,’ she explained.
‘We hand-painted 10 different plates, and then we dissected them as if it was broken.... Then we engineered the image onto a bodice. Then we hand-cut all the porcelain pieces out of the mould we had, then we made each of those pieces again, and numbered them. It was like a jigsaw puzzle.’
From broken crockery to couture... watch the video for more McQueen.
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