This is what Burton has brought to Givenchy, in a move that will not only enrich the world of fashion but seems set to free her, after many years, from the orbit of emotional debt.
At the north London home she shares with her husband, David; their 12-year-old twins, Cecilia and Elizabeth; and their nine-year-old daughter, Romilly, Burton leads me upstairs to a living room with rich, Holbein-green velvet-lined walls. Above the sofa is a large gold-framed photograph by the Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens, and on a high shelf, protected by Perspex, is a pair of armadillo shoes from Plato’s Atlantis, the last collection McQueen finished. Burton and I sit in sunlight, and our conversation stretches out with ease throughout the afternoon.
“Family came first, I suppose,” she reflects. Burton – then Sarah Jane Heard – grew up as the second of five siblings. They lived in a small village outside Manchester, between rolling hills and wild moors, with Burton always more drawn to the latter. Her mother taught music and English, and took them to museums regularly; her father was an accountant. Their house was full of books. As a child, she drew all the time – people, nature, dresses. When the Heard clan needed to go somewhere en masse they traveled, with friends in tow, in a white van. Burton remembers that locals referred to them as “the orphanage.”
Burton knew what she wanted to do from the age of eight, and after a foundation year in Manchester she studied at Central Saint Martins in London, the famous incubator for art and fashion. “Sarah didn’t look like the other fashion students,” her tutor there, Simon Ungless, recalls. “It was so refreshing for somebody just to come in in a great pair of jeans, rather than their knickers on their head.”
It was Ungless who introduced her to his good friend Lee McQueen. “Everyone wanted to work for him,” Burton recalls. “You’d be on a mission to get into those shows or be backstage.” McQueen had graduated from Saint Martins three years before Burton got her first gig as a backstage dresser on his infamous Highland Rape show in 1995. She saw none of it: she was frantically pulling shoes off one model to make sure there were enough for the next. A year later, McQueen took her on. “I think Sarah was the only member of staff we had,” says Verkade, who ran their tiny company.
As Burton learned from McQueen – a man she describes as a “genius” – she took on whole areas of the operation, building categories around his sketches, doing all the knitwear and all the leather. Eventually, she became the head of womenswear. “There’s a big chunk of that brand that has always been Sarah, as long as we’ve been looking at it,” says Verkade.
In her living room, Burton pulls out some sketchbooks from her early days at McQueen.
They’re beautiful – collages of photographic references and sketches with swatches of fabric – but what’s striking is how structured her drawings were then: architectural indications of the collar on a jacket, the seams on a dress, or the buttons on a cape. Decades later, Burton’s sketches have become much looser – she and her pattern-cutters know each other so well by now that she only needs to suggest a design.
She shows me another sketch, in a frame. It’s Lee’s design for her own wedding – a slender oyster dress with antique lace. She had met the photographer David Burton in a pub in King’s Cross, introduced by a friend. “I loved his honesty,” she says. “He’s very straightforward. And he made me laugh.” They married in 2004.
McQueen died six years later. “Everyone was broken,” recalls Burton, who was left to complete his final collection. She had never wanted to take on the role of creative director. Though Burton herself is circumspect about this period, Verkade explains: “She carried a lot of the emotion within the team. I think the team led her to take it, because she cared so much about them.”
From the gilded stillness of Lee’s unfinished collection, Burton moved in 2011 to a deconstruction of the signature McQueen peaked shoulder – now pulled apart and lightly rejoined at the fraying seams, or split in neat-edged velvet. Consciously or not, she was breaking it down in order to rebuild.
