The McQueen SS27 London show did not happen on a pristine white runway. Seán McGirr chose the undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, a 17th-century vault whose floor is lined with the gravestones of long-dead statesmen, and the choice felt less like production design than a statement of intent. The brand has always leaned towards darkness; here, the darkness was literal, architectural, and several centuries deep.
‘It’s kinda personal because bringing McQueen back to its roots in London hit in a different way,’ McGirr said of the homecoming. According to SHOWstudio, McGirr is 35, which means his formative years in London, the city he arrived in as a student and threw himself into its subcultures, are not so distant. That biography is all over this collection.
Rave Culture Meets Neoclassicism in the McQueen SS27 London Show
The conceptual collision McGirr engineered was between rave culture and neoclassicism, with the serenity of Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, encountered at the National Gallery, as an unlikely anchor point. Shot through a McQueen prism, that meant music loud enough to wake the dead and models with horned hairstyles stomping on sky-high platforms. The tension between transcendence and aggression is not a new McQueen register, but McGirr worked it with genuine conviction here.
The silhouette opened with cocoon-shouldered trouser suits, which McGirr described as ‘angel wings’, some spliced at the knee. For three of the men’s suits, he collaborated with Huntsman, the Savile Row tailor, and the craftsmanship showed in the precision of the shoulder and the weight of the cloth. It was a smart pairing: Huntsman’s rigour pulling against McQueen’s tendency towards the theatrical.
Elsewhere, abstracted tie-dye mini dresses spoke to the rave energy, while gowns constructed entirely from beaded skulls, or heavily encrusted with metal leaves, articulated the brand’s dark romanticism at its most maximalist. McGirr said the leaves came from imagining people walking home from a rave at dawn, the wind pressing foliage onto their gowns. It is the kind of image that sounds almost sentimental until you see it rendered in cold metal on a silk ground.
Collaborators and the Weight of McQueen History
Karen Elson, one of Alexander McQueen’s original muses, wore a pink satin gown cinched with a metal harness made by Sean Leane, a jeweller and long-time McQueen collaborator. McGirr was clearly moved to have revived both relationships for his debut London outing, and rightly so. These are not archival gestures for their own sake; they are threads of continuity that give a young designer’s vision something to brace against.
Not everything in the McQueen SS27 London show operated at maximum intensity. Tight peplum jackets worn over frothy, frilled mini skirts introduced levity, and hand-pleated diaphanous gowns brought a quieter, almost devotional softness to the closing passages of the show. The contrast was deliberate. McGirr has spoken before about balancing the house’s aggression with something more fragile, and here that negotiation felt genuinely resolved rather than merely attempted.
There is a particular pressure that comes with staging a homecoming, especially for a house carrying the weight of its founder’s name. The undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn absorbed it well enough, and so did the clothes. Seán McGirr’s McQueen is finding its register, and London, it turns out, suits it. For further information and to explore the full collection, visit Alexander McQueen.
