SARAH BURTON'S QUIET ASCENDANCE

After her mentor and boss ALEXANDER MCQUEEN died in 2010, she took over as CREATIVE DIRECTOR and turned the house into one of today's MOST SUCCESSFUL LUXURY NAMES.

- CATHY HORYN

IN 1996, WHEN THE British designer Sarah Burton was a student at Central Saint Martins, the London arts-and-design college, she asked a teacher, Simon Ungless, to recommend her for an internship at Alexander McQueen. This was something Ungless could easily do: He had worked with McQueen on his earliest collections, including "Taxi Driver," his first after leaving school. Presented on a clothes rack in a room at the London Ritz in 1993, "Taxi Driver" laid out much of the territory that would become synonymous with McQueen. The original "bumster" trousers, which were cut extremely low on the hips in order to lengthen the female torso and demonstrate, he later said, that you could change the way women looked just by cut. The precision tailoring that caressed the body so lightly and seductively it suggested nudity underneath. The black crow feathers that evoked nature and also death. It was all there, though the collection itself did not survive beyond that night. Ungless and McQueen got so hammered they forgot they'd left it in a trash bag behind a club.