Andrew Bolton: This collection is called It’s Only a Game and was inspired by Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock. The collection itself was staged as a chess game, and the inspiration for the chess game came from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Girls walked onto the runway as particular pieces of the chess game. The lead characters of the chess games, in terms of the clothing, were very apparent. And one of the most distinctive pieces was the knight. She was wearing a leather cuirass with a skirt that was made out of horsehair. Her head was covered with a harness and a ponytail that looked like a horse’s tail. And the two queens were actually wearing garments that were inspired by the eighteenth-century panniers, with a wide-hipped silhouette. And the two kings were actually in American footballer outfits with wide shoulder pads and American football helmets.

McQueen was deeply inspired by film throughout his career—Hitchcock, most famously, in collections like Birds—but he was also inspired by films which seemed less artistically driven, like The Green Mile. The finale of the actual collection was a checkmate between the two rival teams, meant to represent Japan on one side and America on the other.