Alexander McQueen Autumn/Winter 2015: The Spirit Of The Rose

The invitation to Sarah Burton's show for Alexander McQueen, which took place in Paris tonight, was an image of faded roses shot as part of a series by the photographer David Sims in 2003. The location was the Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette spent her last days and where Lee Alexander McQueen himself showed in March 2002, thirteen years ago now.

It was, for that and many other reasons, an extremely poignant moment. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum later this week, celebrating the work of the designer who founded this house and who died by his own hand in 2010. Since that time, his long-time first assistant has been creative director and has lovingly and with great sensitivity developed the work he started.

In fact, this latest collection felt more like Sarah Burton's own. The aforementioned invitation was a sign of things to come. With their 18th century-inspired hair, powdered, pale complexions and doll-like features, models resembled nothing more fragile flowers. Their clothes too - ethereal, quintessentially feminine and hand-worked with a delicacy and lightness that is rare - evoked country garden blooms.

In a colour palette restricted to all the shades of pink from blush to magenta, black and ivory, leather skirts were knife-pleated and suspended from bodices edged with a mere trace of lace. Then came dresses entirely constructed in petals of silk and in more lace and torn organza with layer upon layer of tiny frills winding their way across their surfaces.

Where Alexander McQueen's tailoring was - famously - aggressive, Sarah Burton's is softer, still empowering but here narrow-shouldered and with an elongated, skinny sleeve fluted from the elbow down. In leather embossed with roses and trimmed with fur it looked lovely.

In the end, true to the spirit of the house's namesake, this was a darkly romantic and delicate vision of femininity but it was also, from start to finish, touched by a gentle and less troubled hand.