Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2016 Menswear

The metaphors fell like rain in McQueen’s Spring collection for men. Victorian sailors were the protagonists. Imagine them as men adrift, looking for somewhere to belong, seeking a sense of identity in the tattoos with which they covered themselves. All of that could apply to the collection itself.

There was sharply defined elegance in the elongated captain’s coats, but a soft, almost androgynous quality in pajamalike jacquards. Mended denim pieces and fraying jackets felt like well-worn relics of a long voyage. Sarah Burton scattered traditional nautical tattoo motifs—compasses, mermaids, anchors—across her spare tailoring, but storybook sea monsters were a stronger graphic element, in a terrycloth bathrobe no less. And there were suits patterned in dazzle ship camouflage, which looked almost incongruously dynamic in this context. That’s because dynamism was precisely what the collection lacked. Burton’s crew might have been drowned lost boys, suspended out of time, their sole connection to now their footwear. If Fall’s earthbound collection packed a real punch, this one felt all at sea.