The Birds

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.
 

M.C. Escher
Liberation, 1955
lithograph
sheet: 53.02 × 31.27 cm (20 7/8 × 12 5/16 in.)
image: 43.66 × 19.69 cm (17 3/16 × 7 3/4 in.)
The National Gallery of Art, Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt Collection