On a beautiful day in October  something magical took place in London, a drone was hovering over the spectacular Greenwich Naval College, recording the goings-on in a transparent bubble that had landed in the middle of Sir Christopher Wren’s 17th century landmark. It seemed a symbolic irony that the mechanical eye-in-the-sky—a standard device these days for recording fashion spectacles—must have been surveilling the focus of Sarah Burton’s collection hundreds of feet below. The human eye.

In this season of lavish embellishment, this collection was a palette cleanser, although Burton did sprinkle a sequin here and a colorful fringe there. There were also Bosch demons battling with angels in Alexander McQueen’s posthumous collection She also drew inspiration from the surreal and colorful paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, whose work teems with human bodies, in heaven, hell, and on earth.

“The eye is the most unique symbol of humanity—each one is like a fingerprint; each one is completely individual,” she said, explaining the enlarged prints and raffia-fringed images of irises, pupils, and eyelashes embedded in dresses and spilling over a trouser suit. That thought gave her the impetus to begin to grapple with layers of themes that the house of McQueen has always been concerned with: nature and technology, deep history, and present fears.

“It’s sort of about seeing things again,” she said. “Not walking around with your eyes shut, your eyes down. Just seeing each other, recognizing each others’ humanity. Caring about each other.” But against that, she also meant that having open eyes on the world means taking on terrors. Burton recently re-read Orwell’s 1984. “That played into it as well: how do you find human contact in the world we live in, in the world of technology?”

Discover the rest of the collection here

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