McQueen interpreted the corrida from an outsider’s perspective, but followed in the footsteps of Spanish artists Francisco de Goya and Pablo Picasso, both of whom drew upon the bullfight in their own practices. Goya’s depiction of a Spanish knight slain by a bull comes from his series La Tauromaquia (Bullfighting), published in 1816, which offers a visual history of bullfighting in Spain, and directly inspired Pablo Picasso’s 1959 series La Tauromaquia. Though both artists were devoted to the pastime, they also reflected on its mortal aspects.

In addition to the Spanish bullfight, McQueen’s collection was also inspired by the power, beauty, and grace of flamenco. A black ensemble reimagines the dancer’s dress, here paired with a rigid corset with lacing detail. An asymmetrical ruffled skirt insinuates the movement of a traditional tiered flamenco costume. A beaded hat with curving horns by Michael Schmidt situates this look in the corrida, or bullfight, personifying the equally powerful and graceful movements in the ring.

McQueen explores ideas of waste and recycling with a black coatdress conceived to resemble a trash bag; though made of a polyamide/polyurethane-coated plain-weave textile and expertly shaped, its “bin liner” reference is overt. Similarly, artist Rodney McMillian uses post-consumer materials found in secondhand shops. An old bedsheet—synonymous with the body and the bed, a place for love, rest, and even death—was painted with latex, cut down the middle, and stitched back together.

A textile imagined by designer and early McQueen collaborator Simon Ungless, and first used in The Birds (Spring/Summer 1995), makes its return in a red dress. Woven with a radiating houndstooth design (a nod to Dior) that transforms into flying birds, the pattern reimagines the graphic work of M. C. Escher. The textile also recalls the natural phenomenon of murmuration, in which large numbers of starlings fly in formation, morphing between chaos and order—amorphous aerial patterns captured by photographer Richard Barnes.
 

Through sea trade, fine cottons were exported from India to European markets, as in an 1820s white silver-embroidered dress festooned with pleated pink accents. These luxury fabrics were equally prized domestically, such as in a man’s cotton waist sash (patka) at left with gold embroidery and iridescent beetle-wing (elytra) sequins. This tradition of metallic embroidery is echoed in a white McQueen dress with a mid-twentieth-century hourglass silhouette and appliqués of gold-embroidered birds and branches, a look symbolizing the girl emerging from the tree.

A black McQueen dress with a high empire waist alludes to the prevailing silhouette of the Regency period; acorns, a symbol of stability common in British decorative arts, dangle from the torso. A nearby 1820s silk gauze dress, also in black, features a pattern of anchors and crowns celebrating the might of Britain’s navy, the largest in the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A fantastical white line drawing of a twisting tree with creatures emerging from and around it decorates this black strapless dress. The digitally woven scene derives from a series of illustrations by Arthur Rackham for a 1908 publication of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. An expansive elm on the property of McQueen’s seventeenth-century East Sussex home was another source of inspiration to the collection. A branching headpiece of woven twine by Michael Schmidt references both the ancient elm and the stag that lives among it.

McQueen’s “croquet”-style dress shows an interlocking octagon and floral medallion pattern with international resonance. Known in Tibetan as kati rimo (“brocade design”), it was introduced from China through imported silks and adapted widely across Tibet (in goods such as Buddhist temple hangings and painted wooden trunks), as well as in Japan, where it became known as shokkō. McQueen’s affinity for Japanese dress and his personal adoption of Buddhism may have informed his awareness of this pattern.

This costume portrait typifies the turquerie taste that penetrated aspects of European art and culture during the eighteenth century. Jean-Baptiste Greuze has posed an unidentified sitter in an opulent ensemble, which contemporaneous audiences would recognize as à la sultane (“the sultana’s style”), referring to imperial consorts in the harem of an Ottoman sultan.

Known for Arabic, North African, and Western fusion electronic music, Natacha Atlas is photographed here in a kind of “Oriental tableau” inspired by Egyptian mid-twentieth-century photography and classic movies Youssef Nabil viewed growing up. Supine, sensuous, and headless, Atlas nevertheless confronts the “male gaze” implicit in Western fantasies of the Middle East that presuppose a state of feminine vulnerability and passivity. Rather, with her formidable, toned physique (Atlas performed as a belly dancer in London clubs earlier in her career), she controls her own sexuality.