She explained that she’d been inspired by the 17th-century silk weavers of Spitalfields, members of the Huguenot Protestant faith who fled religious persecution in France and settled in London’s East End. “I loved the stories of how they arrived with very little, bringing seeds and bulbs in their pockets to grow. They were gardeners. And they wove their French flowers into the patterns on their silks.”
Burton’s choice of reference point was personal—she is a country girl with a real love of nature—but the resonances run deeper than her attraction to pretty flowers. Alexander McQueen traced part of his family bloodline back to some of the estimated 50,000 Huguenot refugees who were welcomed into Britain by the edict of King Charles II and became producers of high fashion silks for court finery and the great homes of England. McQueen was proud of that link to the first immigrants to bring luxury fashion to London, and he would surely approve of his former protégée using this platform to point to the parallels with today’s migrant crisis.
There was one silk dress, covered with sprigs of flowers, that came somewhere in the middle of the collection and was a near replica of a 17th-century court dress Burton examined. How funny to imagine that this delightful, demure dress might have its own outing at the British court in the 21st century. Kate Middleton would look wonderful in it.