Fashion

Sarah Burton Discusses the History and Future of Alexander McQueen at Forces of Fashion

Sarah Burton takes Vogue’s Sarah Mower on a tour of Alexander McQueen’s Bond Street store and latest exhibition, Roses, while discussing the importance of fashion’s past and future for Vogue’s Forces of Fashion conference….

Seeing Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton in conversation with Vogue’s Sarah Mower is the ultimate peek behind the curtain of the brand. What’s more, the designer rarely grants interviews—and even more rare is an interview on film—making this 25-minute Forces of Fashion conversation about as exclusive as it gets.

Burton and Mower met in the upper room of McQueen’s Bond Street flagship store in London, which has been transformed into a studio. “When I very first started at McQueen, we didn’t have desks, we only had one big pattern-cutting table in the studio,” Burton says of the room’s setup. The idea is to promote fashion and demystify the creation process to all visitors of McQueen’s store. “Anybody can come. Schoolchildren come, teenagers come, grandparents come,” Burton continues. “It’s really a space for everybody to see how we put the collection together.”

Image may contain Sitting Human Person Furniture Table and Sarah Burton — Sarah Burton speaking at Vogue’s Forces of Fashion conference

As the conversation turns to preservation of craft and the importance of setting up a new generation of designers for success, Burton reveals some of what makes her McQueen team so strong: community. “There’s no hierarchy of ideas. It’s a really collaborative process,” she says. The team is famous for its research trips around the United Kingdom, where they mine inspiration for each collection—and perhaps stumble across some new ideas for how to work together. Burton remembers visiting a church in Cornwall where “each kneeler was embroidered by a different person. You could almost feel the sense of community in the room, and this sense of people coming together.”

The communal spirit of Alexander McQueen is on display as Burton gives a tour through the store’s Roses exhibition. She explains the secret details of each dress in the show, from Lee Alexander McQueen’s spring 1999 floral embroidered burlap separates—“a lot of the show pieces at that time,” Burton says, pointing to the freehand embroideries, “were actually made by students”—to her own rose dress from the fall 2018 collection. “For me, the rose is the archetypal British flower, and it also represents a woman to me.”

Special mention goes to the fall 2006 Sarabande dress worn by Tanya Dziahileva, which was made with real flowers cascading off the bodice. It’s been restored twice for exhibitions, with real and fake flowers added for preservation. But right there on the bust, Burton highlights one original flower placed by Lee. “One rosebud from the original dress [is] sitting right here,” she says. Think of it as a symbol of McQueen’s past blossoming into its future.

Buy tickets to Forces of Fashion here.

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Entertainment

A$AP Rocky Turned An Entire Manchester City Kit Into His Album Rollout

Photo: DannyB Photos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A$AP Rocky doesn’t do album rollouts quietly, and this one recruited an entire Premier League club to help. Manchester City, PUMA, and Rocky teamed up on a limited apparel run tied to “Don’t Be Dumb,” his 2026 album, timed around his September 5th show at Co-op Live.

The centerpiece is a long-sleeve PUMA King jersey in black and archive gold, with “DON’T BE DUMB” running down the sleeve and AWGE branding worked in throughout. A bold “MANCHESTER” graphic covers the back. Fans could also add limited “A$AP 11” name-and-number printing onto the club’s actual Home, Away, or Third kits, while supplies lasted at retail.

There’s a players-only version too, and it never went up for sale. That one sticks closer to City’s usual sky-blue identity, with its own sleeve detailing and back graphic — the kind of piece that exists purely because a handful of people got lucky.

The whole rollout kicked off with a one-night pop-up on September 4th, when PUMA turned a spot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter into a pop-up cafe for the night, mixing football, music, and street style into one room before the wider release hit the stadium store the next morning. Some of those jerseys even came with golden tickets to the concert or that Saturday’s match.

Rocky has called the project true to his own design language, and it’s not even his only club collaboration this cycle — a similar drop with AC Milan landed around the same time. At this point, the line between fashion week and matchday has basically disappeared.

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Entertainment

Quavo And Lids Are Going All In On Atlanta With Their New Cap Pack

Photo: Finish Line / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Quavo has never been shy about his hat obsession, and Lids just gave him another outlet for it. Their new “Atlanta” pack drops September 12th, marking another round in a partnership that’s been running strong since 2019.

The collection is a love letter to the city, spread across three very different caps. One mashes up pinstripes, script lettering, and Braves branding into a single design, working navy, red, white, and light blue into the mix. Another goes the opposite direction entirely — fully iced out in crystal detailing, done up in black and red, with both the Falcons and the Braves showing up in the design. The third strips things back to an old-school “ATL” trucker cap in red, white, and gold, the kind of understated piece that lets the city’s name do the talking.

None of this is new territory for Quavo. He’s talked before about waiting on hat releases as a kid, and that same excitement seems to be what’s kept this partnership going years past most celebrity collabs. His earlier Lids run leaned on one moment — the Braves’ 1995 World Series win — but this pack pulls from the city’s whole sports history instead of just one highlight.

Lids has called Quavo one of the rare voices who can blend music, fashion, and sports without it feeling forced, and this drop backs that up. Given how fast his past releases have moved, Atlanta might want to set an alarm for September 12th.

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