After Kate’s dress – what Sarah Burton did next

IF VISITORS to Paris Fashion Week were expecting Alexander McQueen designer Sarah Burton to keep up the fairytale look she mastered for Kate Middleton's wedding dress earlier this year, they will have been shocked by the bondage-inspired collection she showed yesterday.
 
The fashion world has been trying to pinpoint in which direction Burton would take the fashion house ever since founder Lee McQueen committed suicide in February last year. But so far, the 36-year-old has resisted being pigeon-holed, swinging effortlessly from a soft and swan-like collection last season to this month's harsher and more risque pieces.
 
This latest collection blows any preconceptions out of the water, writes Guardian fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley. "For every hint of chin-jutting aggression – the shiny, bondage-inspired corsets, the fetishistic lace-up boots – there was a complimentary dose of softness."
 
After the royal wedding in April, Burton told reporters that Kate had asked for a dress that acknowledged the past, yet looked to the future. It appears that the British designer plans to adopt a similar approach to her own career: incorporating the pinched waistlines and sharp angles of McQueen's legacy while contributing her own unique vision of femininity.
 
"She seems to take all [Lee McQueen's] trademarks and somehow give them a lightness," says British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman. "There's a softness to it that means they're not constrained, which I used to think some of Lee's women were."
 
Buckingham Palace has seen hundreds of thousands of tourists jostle to view an exhibition including the McQueen wedding dress this summer, and there is talk of New York's highly popular Alexander McQueen retrospective exhibition, Savage Beauty, coming to London.
 
But Burton has found a way to escape the shackles of both that dress and that designer. As actress Salma Hayek said from the front-row of yesterday's show: "The brilliance behind the fantasy and the beauty of the show has nothing to do with [Kate's dress]. I think she's already moved on from that. It's gone somewhere else. It was very unexpected. It was amazing." ·