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This season Sarah Burton’s girls appeared looking like bombshell cyborgs complete with space-age visors and dramatic heel-less ankle boots; in short, they looked breathtaking. Showing in the Salle de Wigram, home to some of her mentor’s greatest hits, Burton showed a collection faithful to his meticulous legacy but invigorating it with lightness and positivity. She told i-D online she had been thinking about “a beautiful future, a kind of soft futurism”. The show opened with a flurry of pristine winter whites – skirts gathered in luxurious swathes, jackets tightly belted and flowered to wide peplums under huge fur shawls. Silk and leather dresses decorated with delicate unfurling petals in baby pink let the colour gently seep into the collection. As the show progressed, white lace bonded with stiff black leather and fur poms poms formed to smother dresses, later expanding into huge ostrich feather skirts and coats. These in turn, literally exploded into frothy marabou dresses of layered tuille that seemed to breathe of their own accord as they floated by.
Text: Caroline Newell
Photography: Mitchell Sams
Click here to see our AW12 Womenswear coverage in full.
