Alexander McQueen’s creative director has put her indelible mark on pragmatically poetic collections that draw on Britain’s history and craft heritage. Hamish Bowles travels with Burton and her team to mystic Cornwall for an inspirational walkabout.

Sarah Burton grew up in the no-nonsense North of En­gland, one of five artistic children who was dressed, as she remembers, “in my brother’s hand-me-downs—hence the longing for beautiful clothes!”

That longing eventually took her to Saint Martins art school to study fashion print design. At the time, as Burton remembers, everyone was talking about the provocative talent of a recent graduate, Alexander McQueen, who was rapidly securing a reputation as a designer of iconoclastic brilliance. Burton’s tutor, Simon Ungless, was a friend of McQueen’s and, impressed by his student’s passion for research, suggested that she intern with him. “I was a bit scared,” the soft-spoken Burton admits, “because I wasn’t very ‘fashiony.’ But meeting him was completely mind-blowing: He was so lovely and very, very warm.”

She was also in awe of McQueen’s intuitive talent. On her first day in the designer’s disordered Hoxton Square studio, “he took some lace and pinned this beautiful dress on the stand in an hour, dancing around the mannequin,” Burton recalls. “It was like sculpture—I’ve never seen anything like it.” In those early years, McQueen made a lot of the pieces himself. “In such a short space of time he did everything,” Burton remembers. “Tailoring, eveningwear, dresses, embroidery, leather, knits—everything!”

As a result, McQueen’s team learned never to say no to a technical challenge—because they would often come into the studio in the morning to find a finished garment on the stand that McQueen had spent the night resolving himself. In the beginning, Burton admits that she “couldn’t really sew or pattern-cut—I had to learn really quickly,” and with money tight, there was no room for error because, as she says, “you couldn’t afford to remake it!” When the brand was acquired by François Pinault’s Gucci Group (now Kering) in 2000, and resources and production capabilities were exponentially amplified, Burton spent time in the new Italian factories teaching herself their specialist skills. She realized that if she showed “that you can get your hands dirty,” the craftspeople in turn could achieve results that often exceeded her expectations.