The creative partnership between Alexander McQueen and the studio of the late, great David Collins has produced some of the more dramatic and intriguing of recent retail spaces, including the McQueen menswear store on Savile Row and the McQ store on Dover Street. And now the Bond Street womenswear flagship has just reopened after a redesign by Collins' studio.
The 250 square metre, two-storey store has been given the baroque bespoke panelling that is a signature of the new store designs. Flora and fauna, including shells, wings, cactus flowers and tangled leaves, are everywhere in the moulded plaster panels, while tiny skulls and grimacing gargoyles add a gothic twist to the bucolic splendour.
This twin fascination with the natural world and the gothic imagination continues in furniture, with gazelle hooves and monster claws for feet. Materials meanwhile are suitably splendid, with white and grey book matched marble and deep pile carpets at floor level, gilded silver and gold mirrors and black lacquer and aged brass shelving and hanging rails.
'It's very McQueen to see something from a distance and think it's one thing and then look up close and discover something else,' says Alexander McQueen creative director Sarah Burton of the flagship redesign. 'It's important that everything in the stores feels very precious.'
Inside, the store has been given the baroque bespoke panelling that is a signature of the updated store concept. Flora and fauna, are everywhere in the moulded plaster panels, while miniature skulls and gargoyles add a gothic twist to the bucolic splendour
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