The first time I really met Sarah Burton was when Alexander McQueen was making my wedding dress. It was the spring of 2005 and I was a writer for American Vogue.
Alexander was at the height of his genius then, and we had become friends since we met in the early 1990s. He had a charming studio in Islington, North London, a beautiful space in a Victorian building full of natural light.
He also had a brilliant team around him, including one Sarah Burton, his then 30-year-old head of womenswear design, who had joined his entourage in 1996 as a 21-year-old intern.
It would be Sarah who would make my dress, from one of Alexander’s hastily sketched designs. Little did I know that his prodigy would soon create another, much more famous wedding dress – for Kate Middleton – forging a partnership that has become one of the most powerful in fashion.
Recent news that Burton is stepping down from the helm of McQueen, a role she has held since Alexander’s sudden death in 2010, has shocked the fashion world. Burton was so intertwined with McQueen’s vision that it’s hard to imagine the brand without her.
Birthday belle: Kate’s official portrait to mark her 40th birthday saw her wearing one of Burton’s creations
Rare talent: McQueen creative director Sarah Burton (left) with supermodel Kate Moss
In many ways, she is the industry’s best-kept secret: a designer who shuns the spotlight herself, but whose creations for the Princess of Wales have made headlines around the world.
Kate has relied on Burton for her major, high-profile public functions for years. At successive Bafta awards, she wore flowing McQueen chiffon evening gowns reminiscent of 1940s film stars.
For formal walks and meetings, she is rarely without a smart McQueen jacket or suit, and for the most important royal events she chooses Burton’s designs again and again.
Kate looked flawless for her sister Pippa’s wedding in 2017 in a dark pink McQueen dress in heavy silk crepe with exaggerated cuffs. For Prince Harry and Meghan’s wedding the following year, she wore a simple but impeccably cut cream coat dress.
At Prince Louis’s christening it was an ivory dress with V-neck and puffed shoulders, and for the Trooping the Color in 2018 it was a baby blue dress with a square neck.
For her 40th birthday portraits, taken by legendary fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, Kate wore three McQueen dresses: a dramatic red dress with billowing sleeves and pockets; a white one-shoulder dress; and a fairytale tulle and organdy ball gown.
For King Charles’ coronation in May, both Kate and daughter Charlotte wore McQueen. There is clearly a bond of incredible trust between the princess and Sarah.
From my first meeting with her, I knew I was in talented hands. The design was a traditional dress with a corset. It featured a tiny waist, a long skirt and intricate embroidery on the bodice, with layers of hand-pleated silk net delicately stitched onto the dramatic train.
Changing dress: Burton fixes Kate’s train as she prepares to walk down the aisle on her wedding day in 2011
My first fitting involved trying on a ‘toile’ (a prototype that couture houses use to perfect a design). I remember Sarah as a modest young woman with translucent skin, a few freckles and dark blonde hair with long bangs that she often hid behind. Growing up in the Northwest, she usually wore jeans and a white shirt, always with a pincushion on her arm.
She was focused and determined to make the perfect dress for me.
I remember being surprised that the toile was made of the same silk taffeta as my dress; it is more common for the toiles to be made of a cheap fabric in case mistakes occur. But Sarah explained that Alexander often made toiles from the same material as the final piece, no matter how expensive, because it allowed him to be more precise.
By the time my wedding dress was finished, Sarah had made a total of nine toiles over several months, created an incredible corset and had the most beautiful embroidery done. Kate would undoubtedly have gone through an even longer process for her wedding dress.
Sarah’s attention to detail developed from the earliest stages of her career. She fitted, she refined, she got as excited about the wedding as I did, and even ordered a pair of silk embroidered shoes to match the dress.
Needless to say, the final dress was beautiful, and she had made sure to have a little light blue silk bow sewn into it so that I had ‘something blue’.
The bill for such a dress would normally have been enormous, in the tens of thousands of pounds, but Alexander made it for me at ‘cost’ and made no profit.
McQueen dream: Kate in a chiffon ball gown
For the next several years, Sarah was a constant presence at the McQueen home. She was Alexander’s right hand, but she never had charisma or grace. She was simply the silent force behind the throne.
The company later moved to a glamorous office in Clerkenwell, and every time I was in London I would pop in, either to see Alexander or occasionally to borrow a dress for an event. Sarah was the kind of person who, no matter how busy she was, would come out of her studio to say hello.
Of course we always talked about the fashion world, but we also often talked about our children. Not only is she a highly successful career woman, but, just as importantly, wife of photographer David Burton and mother of three children: ten-year-old twins and a seven-year-old son.
When Alexander died suddenly in 2010, aged just 40, Burton was devastated. But there was little doubt as to who would take over from him, and she was named his successor almost immediately.
Still, she knew she was following in the footsteps of a genius and was (wisely) intimidated by the prospect. After she was offered the role, she told me, she frantically called Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and asked her advice. She said Anna simply told her, “You have to do it” – and that was the end of it.
It wasn’t long after Burton became creative director of McQueen that Kate Middleton commissioned her to design the dress for her wedding to Prince William in 2011.
Sarah, the soul of discretion, kept the whole thing a secret until the very last minute, although Kate was rumored to wear McQueen after apparently admiring Sara Buys’ beautiful wedding dress, also designed by Burton, when she married the son of Queen Camilla, Tom. Parker Bowles, 2005.
Writer Plum Sykes pictured in a beautiful Alexander McQueen dress on her own wedding day
With its nipped in waist, dramatic skirt, three-metre train and delicate lace sleeves and shoulders, Kate’s wedding dress was a stunning piece of work that catapulted Burton into another league.
The dress redefined and softened the famously sharp McQueen silhouette for a new era.
Burton’s take on the McQueen look would henceforth be a softer, slightly more feminine version of what had sometimes been too edgy and extreme for some women.
In one of her rare interviews, Burton called her style “soft armor for women,” which high-profile women like the Princess of Wales might find useful as a sartorial philosophy.
“You can be dominant in a calm way,” Burton told British Vogue in 2018 about her work practices in the office and in the editing room.
After the royal wedding, she reached a new level of global fame as a zeitgeist-defining designer. Yet the attention didn’t change her and, most admirably, there was no suggestion that she would use her relationship with Kate to promote herself.
There is no diva here; just a woman whose talent and work speak for themselves.
From then on, it seems Kate was hooked on the look. But it’s not just Burton’s royal connections that are impressive. She has also built the McQueen brand – still relatively young when she took over – into a hugely successful business, with 100 stores around the world and an annual turnover of £600-700 million.
Since 2010, Burton has produced two beautiful collections per year. She can make everything from dresses, suits, evening gowns and jeans to shoes, handbags, jewelry and sunglasses, all with that cool, covetable McQueen look: the sharp shoulders, the impossibly small waist, the long torso that transforms a woman. into a warrior.
Over the years, she has dressed some of the most iconic female stars in the world, including Hollywood A-lister Cate Blanchett, models Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, and musicians Florence Welch and FKA Twigs. Lady Gaga has never looked more stylish at the Oscars than she did in 2019, when she wore a stark black, 1950s-inspired McQueen dress.
And when former child star Elle Fanning stepped onto the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival this summer in a pale pink McQueen corseted ball gown and a flowing chiffon skirt, she exuded the glamor of adult film stars.
Yet Burton was never just about celebrities and models. When Francois-Henri Pinault, owner of the Kering Group, who acquired a majority stake in the McQueen brand in 2001, hosted a fabulous candlelight dinner in London to celebrate the opening of the flagship Alexander McQueen store on Old Bond Street in 2019, wasn’t surprised that the guest list for the party was as inclusive of the team in the studio as it was of the most important people in the fashion world.
True to Burton’s work ethic, her studio’s pattern cutter, corset maker and other technicians included then British Vogue editor Edward Enninful and supermodel Naomi Campbell.
On Saturday she will present her latest collection under the McQueen brand during Paris Fashion Week. Fashion’s VIPs will no doubt gather to see it, and I imagine there will be a tear or two shed, as it will truly feel like the end of an era.
I hope that Burton, still only 49, will start her own label after a well-deserved rest and not leave the fashion world completely.
She is one of those rare people who have flair, determination and technical skills in equal measure, and who have quietly risen to the top on talent alone.
And there’s no doubt that as she continues to design, the Princess of Wales will be one of her very first clients.