Alexander McQueen’s legacy is a complicated one to manage. Meet the designer taking on the house’s heritage—and making it his own.
BLUE SKY THINKING. From far left: Producer and singer-songwriter Florence Sinclair, model Celina Ralph, gallerist Oyinkansola Dada, and model Sacha Quenby mix it up in McGirr’s twisty subversions of traditional English tailoring. Fashion Editor: IB Kamara. Photographed by Campbell Addy. Vogue, Winter 2025
There’s been nothing but rain all week in Paris—it’s rained until every plane tree in the Tuileries shed its leaves—but on the night Seán McGirr presents his spring 2025 collection for Alexander McQueen across the Seine from the Louvre, the city is bathed in a golden September light. Perhaps that’s helping the 36-year-old Dubliner—plucked from the JW Anderson studio less than a year ago—look so composed as he takes François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of the Kering group, which owns McQueen, through rail after rail of heritage designs and explains, in his gentle Irish lilt, how he’s contorted them: Jermyn Street tuxedos with curlicue lapels; communion dresses in provocative, translucent crepe; rugby tops made camp with Etonian frills.
Then again, perhaps McGirr’s air of calm is merely relative. With less than 20 minutes until showtime in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the paparazzi calls accompanying each VIP arrival echo around the neoclassical courtyard. Backstage, McQueen staffers with pincushion armbands are moving so quickly that the tape measures thrown over their shoulders trail behind them like streamers; models in bathrobes stand to attention; and, in a corner of the room, embroiderers are trimming the silver threads of the banshee headdress that will close the show.
TURNING HEADS. McGirr, now a year into his tenure at McQueen
Even amid the tumult, this last detail is arresting—at once a tribute to London’s nocturnal rebels and a nod to Alexander “Lee”…
