How the House of Alexander McQueen Distilled Its Dark Beauty Into a New Breakout Perfume

What does the world of Alexander McQueen smell like? Look no further than creative director Sarah Burton’s most recent collection for the fashion house. “Beauty entwined with darkness is McQueen,” she says, perched inside the Music Room of Spencer House on the morning after her Fall show in London, where models walked the runway wearing poetic prints, eiderdown coats and cobweb knits. Channeling the same sensuous provocation that characterizes her sartorial instincts, Burton settled on a trio of bewitching night flowers to form the key notes of the new perfume, which makes its much-anticipated debut today stateside at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Gesturing to the bounteous white flowers behind her—a bespoke arrangement by McQueen collaborator, florist Flora Starkey, who has worked on sets for the shows—Burton notes that the tuberose has such a beautiful character. “And there is nothing half-hearted about the jasmine or ylang-ylang,” she adds. These blooms have a mighty history behind their delicate guises, too. The jasmine is in the pantheon of royal flowers, befitting the regality of the McQueen legacy (and current patronage of the Duchess of Cambridge), and the ylang-ylang brings the exoticism of the Indian Ocean. Tuberose is integral (incidentally, the preferred scent of the late McQueen muse Isabella Blow) and a flower deemed so carnally outré by Victorian England, young ladies were forsworn from sniffing it.

A fragrance lover herself, Burton designed the heavy, blown-glass flacon—capped with majestic golden metalwork feathers—to be seen. It now sits on her own bathroom shelf in North London, along with a collection of colorful antique bottles, including Chanel’s Gardénia (the scent she wore most before creating her own) and other objects from her travels.

Burton is carefully creating her own traditions at Alexander McQueen—the new romanticism, the softer touch—and the perfume was a thoughtful three years in the making, requiring many trips to London’s botanical exemplar Kew Gardens to explore its botanical archives. “It’s an amazing place, filled with Darwin’s specimens from the Galapagos.” An affinity with nature also harks back to Burton’s upbringing in the rural Mancunian countryside, picking and pressing meadow flowers. Something so exquisite and painstakingly crafted, she says proudly, is the antithesis of throwaway fashion. True to that spirit, her scent, with its weighty permanence, promises to stay awhile.

Alexander McQueen McQueen Parfum, $395, available now at Saks Fifth Avenue

 

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