Backstage after his third Paris fashion week show, Dublin-born Seán McGirr, 36, was asked whether he was growing in confidence as the designer of Alexander McQueen. “I guess so?” he replied, with an emphasis on the question mark. “I spend so much time with the incredible atelier. Really getting into it, you know? So, I guess so.”
The clothes spoke with more self-assurance than McGirr took credit for. The setting was the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, built in 1785 as part of the Natural History Museum in Paris, a room catwalk-shaped but Dickens-coded – a tall, narrow alleyway heavy with wooden cabinets, which once showcased scientific curiosities from all over the world. The entrance to the runway was a dazzling glass corridor from which the models appeared before stepping on to the wooden floor, as if emerging from a hall of mirrors.
McGirr’s starting point for the season was Night Walks, Charles Dickens’ autobiographical essay recounting nocturnal walks taken through London while suffering from insomnia. Not an obvious aesthetic reference, but a perfect one at a house where McQueen’s very first collection was named Jack The Ripper Stalks His Victims. The show began with black tailoring, strict yet fine-boned so that the models walked with fluid grace, casting exaggerated silhouettes with pinched shoulders and proud collars, high armholes and narrow waists in inky twill wool. “McQueen is about a waist,” said McGirr, adding that he had “taken pieces from the archive and reworked them for today”.
Then came flounced dresses, sharpened to a point with lace-up Victorian booties and worn, in 2025, with black sunglasses. McGirr said he was “thinking about the idea of the modern dandy, and especially of Oscar Wilde, who is someone [whose legacy] I grew up with as a teenager from Dublin”. There was blood red, soft dawn-sky lilac, and a queasy green the colour of absinthe, or of Wilde’s signature carnations. The exaggerated points of the shoes were taken from “a box of shoes we found from 1994, all beaten up”.
It is, to paraphrase Dickens, the worst of times and the best of times for McGirr to be wrestling with the heavy heritage of Alexander McQueen. The worst of times, because slowing sales means an urgency to deliver commercial hits, which is leading to a high turnover of creative directors. For McGirr, the return to the scene this Paris fashion week of Sarah Burton, his predecessor at McQueen who is now helming Givenchy, has added another layer of pressure as he goes head to head with his old boss.
But it is also the best of times, because the prevailing winds of fashion are turning back toward what McQueen does best. The month of catwalk shows now drawing to a close in Paris has brought a return to hourglass tailoring, and a rejection of the oversized, stretched, unisex silhouettes with which Balenciaga and its many followers dominated fashion until recently. Some observers attribute this shift to an Ozempic-fuelled return to narrow bodies. Others see it as part of a broader cultural backlash against “woke” culture, in which a Trumpian return to two genders is reflected in ultra-feminine silhouettes in women’s clothing. Either way, it places McQueen’s fetishisation of waists, heels and lace back in a fashion sweet spot.
