London has given fashion some of its most legendary and acclaimed designers, among them Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, and Lee Alexander McQueen. Yet each member of this trinity eventually decamped to Paris after planting their roots in the United Kingdom. For many designers across the globe, Paris, the birthplace of haute couture, has been, and is to this day, the one and only fashion mecca.
When Irishman Seán McGirr took on Alexander McQueen, the brand, in October of 2023, following Sarah Burton’s exit, it felt as if the entire fashion ecosystem, insiders and fans alike, raised a collective eyebrow. Burton had been McQueen’s right hand and kept his brand alive after his death in 2010. McGirr, conversely, was an unknown, having worked for Jonathan Anderson at JW Anderson, out of the spotlight, as such a position affords a designer. When McGirr’s debut McQueen collection walked the runway in March of 2024 in Paris, some raved and some scoffed. In a way, inspiring such a polarizing reaction seemed right down the McQueen alley.
That collection was shown in a parking lot in Paris that, it seemed, was intended to evoke the in-the-fringes spirit of those early McQueen shows. It lacked the polish and cohesiveness of Burton’s collections, which were often balanced and harmonious, but that seemed to be by design. McGirr appeared to want to return McQueen to its roots. This season, by taking his spring-summer 2027 show back to London Fashion Week, which McQueen left in 2001, he fulfilled that intention at last.
The cavernous gatehouse of a historic Tudor-era Inns of Court in Bloomsbury, with tall arches carved in stone, provided the setting for McGirr’s most stylized show for McQueen yet. He said he’d been inspired by a painting he saw at the National Gallery in London, Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, which predates the onset of the Tudor era by about four decades. “This painting represents this idea of transcendence, serenity—these words I could not get out of my mind,” said McGirr backstage. “I wanted to bring two worlds together, neoclassicism and London’s rave culture, and create this sort of tension.” Even if Della Francesca was an early Renaissance master rather than a neoclassicist, McGirr’s conceit sparked a certain curiosity.
“There’s a different attitude in London; there is a playful edge,” McGirr said, “people mix things in the street in the wrong way; it’s maybe not as conventional [as other cities] when it comes to style. I love the wrongness.”
He cited Cyberdog Rave Bar, the haven in London’s Camden neighborhood, as an inspiration, which he said he first visited when he was 13, and tasked A. G. Cook, the Charli xcx collaborator and one of London’s most venerated music producers at the moment, with providing an oontz-oontz soundtrack that sent a chill down everyone’s spines. One gets the sense that McGirr is the best kind of man to party with, and while the McQueen brand is known for threading a certain darkness, McGirr’s version is at its best when it embraces this side of his range. The kids who venerate McQueen as a fashion figurehead these days, after all, are likely to be found at the Cyberdog, just like McGirr once was.
