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Beneath the Paris fashion week hoopla – Chappell Roan resplendent in the front row, champagne flowing backstage – there were dark undercurrents at Alexander McQueen’s Paris fashion week show. The brand has seen a 60% decline in turnover over the past three years. Workforce cuts were made in the London headquarters last year, and a third of the brand’s 180 employees in Italy are thought to be at risk of losing their jobs. Fifteen years after the death of Lee McQueen, the brand is struggling to maintain momentum.
The founder is a hallowed name in the fashion industry, and one of the few modern designers to whose character and story the wider public feel a connection. But the generation who wore McQueen’s original bumsters have aged out of shock-value fashion, and the name has less power over younger consumers.
Perhaps adversity suits McQueen, which has always leant into a fatalistic kind of glamour. Seán McGirr, the 37-year-old Dubliner who has been creative director since 2023, showed one of his strongest collections to date. The show opened with a herringbone jacket long enough – if barely – to pass as a dress, strictly buttoned through the waist and dissolving into soft waves that skimmed the upper thigh. (Backstage, McGirr said he had been looking at archive pieces from McQueen’s 20-year-old Widows of Culloden collection, a masterpiece of controlled emotion, for the silhouettes.)
A corset-boned white lace dress was topped with a shoulder cape of glimmering feathers – this time hand-embroidered in silk rather than plucked from birds, times having changed since the 1990s. Last season’s show brought a literal revival of the bumster trouser, but this time the harness-lashed trousers were waisted with the slightest dip at the centre of the spine, creating a heart-shaped frame around the base of the spine – once described by Lee McQueen as “the most erotic part of anyone’s body”.
Models had long lashes, pointed nails and tonged curls: the kind of glamour you see on young women on nights out in cities all over the world, rather than the avant garde painted faces and artfully distressed spiky strands that are de rigueur on catwalks. It worked, giving the show an immediacy and relevancy that sometimes gets lost in a house where the archives are so revered. “It was important to me that the girls looked like they dressed themselves,” McGirr said. “I’m inspired by London girls. West End girls, I guess, with a bit of Camden as well.” There was another layer of British fashion history in the pert miniskirts and knee-high boots, which nodded to Mary Quant.
Every McQueen show needs a touch of psychodrama. McGirr, along with everyone else who observes contemporary life as it is lived on the streets and online, is thinking about the curated nature of modern identity. “We’re really ‘on’ all the time, you know? We’re constantly performing. It feels like there’s some kind of psychological disruption going on there, and I wanted to look at that. There is paranoia, and perfectionism, and performance.”
