It was announced last October that the Dublin-born designer Seán McGirr would be taking over reins at Alexander McQueen. Sarah Burton, who had been at the label for 26 years, 13 as creative director, would be departing. McGirr will present his debut collection at 8PM on March 2 during Paris Fashion Week, and today he offered a preview of the new McQueen under his creative oversight.
The series of campaign images feature Debra Shaw and Frankie Rayder. Both models worked with the late designer, who passed away 10 years ago almost to the day, appearing on his runways and in campaigns at his eponymous label and during his stint at Givenchy. Here, Shaw and Rayder are found in a forest, wearing toy skull masks and some of McGirr’s first designs at the house: a broken mirror sheath, a draped tartan dress, a hefty and spacious suit.
Lee Alexander McQueen had a particular affinity with trees. “I’ve got a 600-year-old elm tree in my garden,” he told Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower back in 2008. “And I made up this story of a girl who lives in it and comes out of the darkness to meet a prince and become a queen.” As eagle-eyed fans know, this was about his fall 2008 collection “The Girl Who Lived in a Tree.” It was a story about a feral girl, a recurrent heroine in the McQueen universe. In McGirr’s, Shaw and Rayder evoke a similar energy: hard-edged, rebellious, and alluringly mischievous.
McGirr is the first designer to lead the house that has not worked with Lee McQueen himself. At 35, he is part of a crop of fashionphiles who came of age when McQueen was at his creative peak. To most millennials, the designer’s visual language is intrinsic to their collective definition of fashion. The McQueen red tartan and skull motifs, together with the original Alexander McQueen logo (with the “c” inside the “Q”) that was first drawn by McQueen over 30 years ago, are what many in the mainstream, to this day, visually associate the most with the house and its founder. There’s also the famous McQueen skull scarf, which debuted on the spring 2003 runway and became one of the It-items of the aughts. It has recently resurfaced on TikTok, with Gen Z rediscovering its sartorial sorcery.
That these elements are resurfacing as part of McGirr’s first creative push for McQueen offers insight into his direction for the house. It’s the McQueen you remember, but re-contextualized for a new day.
