Alexander McQueen / Spring 2013 RTW

There was a buzz at Alexander McQueen—a buzz generated, quite literally, by bees. “I don’t know what started it,” laughed Sarah Burton backstage before the show. “Maybe female worker bees, like all of us in the studio.” She picked up a cylindrical mesh headpiece and put it on. “These were inspired by beekeepers’ hats.” All around her, pale, attenuated girls were being strapped into wasp-waist corseted double-peplumed jackets made of gold-on-black honeycomb-patterned jacquard jackets, cagelike pannier dresses, and hard, tortoiseshell-resin harnesses and bras. On a table lay the deep gilded-metal chokers, crawling with jeweled bees, which were about to be clamped on as the finishing touch.

The result was certainly faithful to the late Alexander McQueen’s templates—the hourglass silhouette, the romantic crinolines, the uncompromising shoes (which this time were sculpted as hollow Lucite wedges, with golden crystals rattling in the heels). Burton, however, tends to look more to the positive creative forces of nature for her source material, and she’s got a bit of another kind of life-force creativity going on in a personal way, too: She’s pregnant, due in February.

Although, in the macabre McQueen tradition, there was something authentically creepy-repulsive about John Maybury’s film of swarming bees that played at the end of the runway, Burton emphasized that she’s more interested in “sensuality and the female form, and doing something light but not naked.” The pretty, exaggerated prom dresses, studded with flowers (after all, bees need pollen) at the end expressed that lightness best. McQueen has a large list of personal clients who queue for dresses made to measure. They’ll be swarming all over these.