No-one does a London location quite like Alexander McQueen: today's menswear show was held in a disused Victorian coal yard in Kings Cross, behind the new site of Saint Martins, the college that was the late designer's alma mater

The clothes in the collection in the spring 2014 collection were as evocative as the setting, striding onto carefully dampened cobbles from within swirls of ethereal smoke. 

Delicate double-breasted silk suiting  came in tea-stained, vellum shades, with a patina of broderie and lace that later appeared as digital prints worked around the house's signature skull motif.

This was subtly embossed and recreated in jacquard on tailoring that was reminiscent of a very particular, louche-but-sartorially-severe time during the the 1930s, where opulence came in texture and surface adornment but was reined in by a strictness of line. Oxford bags-style shorts in fluttering silk, long-line, double-breasted blazers and Chinoiserie-inspired long waistcoats were redolent of Brideshead. On opium, perhaps.
 

Elsewhere, contemporary pieces mixed in with the theme in broderie-backed cream denim jackets and trenches picked out with mimeographed buckle, button and sleeve details that felt as phantom-like as the models and setting did.

At the end of the show, designer Sarah Burton took her bow, after a season out last year for the birth of her twins. A nice welcome back for a designer fiercely upholding the values of her predecessor's label, name and reputation, from the slick suiting to the slick cobblestones it trod.