McQueen Comes Home To London With A Collection Of Angels, Ravers And Rebellion

By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)

McQueen’s return to London Fashion Week felt inseparable from the city itself. For Spring/Summer 2027, Seán McGirr brought Alexander McQueen back to the official schedule for the first time since 2001, presenting beneath the Gothic vaulted ceiling of the Undercroft at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel.

Ancient stone, wooden benches and a star-patterned ceiling gave the show an ecclesiastical grandeur, but the collection was never solemn. McGirr placed British tailoring alongside the restless energy of London after dark, drawing on both Savile Row tradition and the city’s rave culture.

The result was caught between the angelic and the unruly.

The tailoring came from Huntsman, the legendary Savile Row house and longtime McQueen collaborator. McGirr worked with the house on sharply cut suits inspired partly by Tommy Nutter, the celebrated rebel who made traditional tailoring feel more flamboyant and theatrical. Exaggerated shoulders resembled furled angel wings, while thick leather collars gave the immaculate suits a harder edge.

The hair shifted the mood entirely. Models walked with their hair sculpted into twin peaks, recalling the unmistakable silhouette of Keith Flint, The Prodigy’s frontman. Formal tailoring collided with rave culture: angels above the shoulders, ravers underneath.

That tension continued through the evening looks. Beautifully cut gowns in lacquered satin and other luxurious fabrics were interrupted by harnesses, open-backed corsetry and warped fabric. Shaun Leane, one of Lee McQueen’s most important collaborators, returned to the house, creating jewellery and harness-like pieces that brought a familiar darkness to the clothes.

Metallic leaves appeared across dresses and tailoring as though caught in the wind, while mesh, perforated leather and dissolving jacquards pushed the collection towards ravewear. Then came the skulls: one extraordinary dress was covered in interlinked, hand-embroidered metal skulls, each individually crafted across the body.

The skull has been part of McQueen’s visual language for decades, but here it felt less like a quotation than part of a broader conversation between the house’s history and McGirr’s instincts. He was not attempting to recreate Lee McQueen. Instead, he took the symbols and tensions that have always made the house powerful and pushed them into his own exaggerated world.

McGirr has now been at McQueen long enough for his handwriting to be recognisable. Sharply cut shoulders, low-slung trousers, translucent corsetry and exaggerated proportions have appeared in previous collections, but here they were given greater scale and drama.

There was also a clear appetite for craft. Gowns became elaborate constructions of lace, metallic embellishment, stretched fabric and corsetry. A silver hourglass dress was built from metallic jacquard and painted alloy foliage, while other looks were covered in metallic flowers and intricate surface treatments.

The clothes were often grand, but McGirr refused to let them become too polished. A beautifully constructed gown revealed the body through sheer lace; a formal suit was interrupted by a thick leather collar; a romantic silhouette acquired a harness. Refinement was continually pulled towards something more dangerous.

The beauty followed the same logic. Skin was kept relatively bare, roots were visible and the hair rose into sharp, almost horn-like shapes, giving the models the appearance of having come straight from a night that had not yet ended.

The collection did not choose between refinement and rebellion. It allowed both to exist in the same wardrobe: a perfectly cut suit for after midnight, a grand gown made more threatening through exposed skin and hardware, a skull transformed into jewellery, a Savile Row silhouette sent towards the dance floor.

The casting carried its own sense of history. Paloma Elsesser appeared alongside Karen Elson, whose relationship with McQueen stretches back to the house’s early years and its now-iconic Spring/Summer 2001 Voss show. The connection between past and present was clear, but the collection did not feel trapped by it.

McGirr took the ingredients that made London so important to McQueen’s identity and brought them together in his own way: Savile Row and the underground, churches and nightclubs, old institutions and the people who occupy them after dark.

Under the Gothic arches of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, the combination felt entirely at home.

Spring/Summer 2027 was McQueen coming back to London, but it was not a homecoming built on nostalgia. It was a collection about the city’s contradictions, dressed for the night.