Complex garment patterns emerge in McQueen’s dress designs, informed both by his training and his tactile sensitivity to cloth. This grouping of dresses made after McQueen’s appointment to Givenchy attest to his skills in lightness acquired while at the couture house. Draping forms the basis of a pink dress from Irere (Spring/Summer 2003), while a black dress with insets and godets from Pantheon ad Lucem (Fall/Winter 2004–5) and a lace look from the pre–Fall/Winter 2007–8 collection demonstrate his proficiency in generating sinuous movement around the body.

Despite portraying humanity’s Atlantean return to the sea (a comment on global warming echoed by Andreas Gursky’s monumental photograph documenting coastlines, also from 2010), the overall tone of Plato’s Atlantis was not pessimistic. Rather, the collection affirmed interconnectedness and circularity. Two dresses with blue mandala-like print designs evoke the cosmic ocean and water's life-giving power.

Plato’s Atlantis presented distinctive, conceptual footwear designs, including the now-iconic “Armadillo” boot. The collection’s “Titanic” shoe design with “Meccano” heels (shown here in a black ballerina style) references the famous ocean liner sunk by an iceberg, a reminder of nature’s might as humanity faces rising seas.

McQueen’s explorations of natural selection inspired studies of the beauty found in strength. Plato’s Atlantis references snakes, moths, stingrays, and jellyfish, celebrating nature’s protective camouflage and evolutionary defense mechanisms. The collection’s digitally collaged textiles capture meticulous likenesses of land, sky, and sea animals, recalling life-casting techniques used in lead-glazed earthenware to achieve remarkable animal facsimiles.

Inspired by European mourning practices, McQueen balanced the feminine form with the grandeur of decay in two looks of delicately ruched black net over white that accentuates the body while mimicking “crape,” textured silks fashionable for grieving. McQueen also referenced flowers, seen here in muted pink shoes with blooms at the heel. Similarly, Dirck de Bray’s still life depicts wildflowers picked at the height of their beauty, with some beginning to wilt, a candid reminder of the passage of time.

This black lace dress with patterns of flowers in vases features wide hips, a silhouette referencing eighteenth-century styles, which appear throughout Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). The film follows the exploits of Redmond Barry, who ascends to become Lord Barry Lyndon before fate ultimately unravels his self-styled transformation. The fatalistic romanticism in Barry Lyndon and evoked in the Sarabande collection underscores shared artistic proficiencies of Kubrick and McQueen, including exceptional craftsmanship and capacity for world-making.

This painting’s Depression-era seaside setting, acid colors, and jumbled bodies suggest frenetic derby scenes from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Deliverance, McQueen’s collection inspired by the 1969 film. The designer translated 1930s-style bias-cut dresses into looks that include competitor numbers. Jersey dresses worn by models stampeding to cross a finish line onstage represented a notable departure from McQueen’s signature tailoring. These knit-elastic ensembles allow the wearer an athlete’s freedom of movement.

McQueen based his Deliverance collection on director Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which follows impoverished couples competing to win a dance marathon set in a Santa Monica dance hall during the Great Depression. The bleak reality of the Depression referenced by the film—and some of the Americana-inspired looks in McQueen’s runway show—are captured by these period photographs.

Deliverance was a live rendition, choreographed by Michael Clark, of the Great Depression–era dance marathon depicted in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In McQueen’s portrayal, the film’s “dance to the death” becomes a poignant metaphor for the experience of working in fashion. Despair and exhaustion—of the Depression, of dance marathons, of designers—palpably accelerate until the performance culminates in a dancer collapsed lifelessly at center stage.

This black-feathered “raven cape” foreshadows the deadly finale of Deliverance’s dance-hall performance. Ravens, like some other birds of prey, are traditionally associated with death. McQueen’s use of such memento mori devices connects his work with other art historical representations of life’s transience—and preciousness. For instance, in Jean-Baptiste Auguste Clésinger’s vanitas, an owl peering at a crowned human skull symbolizes the futility of material wealth in the face of fate.