Knowing that Lee Alexander McQueen found inspiration in movies, Sean McGirr looked to one of his personal favourites, Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, as a starting point for fall. “I wanted to address the psychological conflict that I think is happening right now in the sense that we’re always on, always curating. There’s this idea of paranoia and perfection,” he said. In Safe, Julianne Moore’s environmental illness sends her to a New Age guru’s clinic where she fails to get better. Nothing quite that insidious happened at McGirr’s McQueen show tonight; he’s buffed the hard edges off here.
Or nearly all of them, anyway. Leather pants were slashed up and down the legs with open zips and dipped low in the back like McQueen’s notorious bumsters. The rest, though, would pass muster with mom. McGirr’s latest, with its miniskirts and knee-high boots, seemed aimed straight at the heart of the Gen Z demographic that was represented in the front row by Chappell Roan, Myha’la, Sophie Thatcher, et al.
The collection’s closest Lee Alexander McQueen progenitor might be “It’s Only a Game,” the spring 2005 show that played out on a giant chessboard, one of his “prettiest, lightest and most accessible” outings, Vogue said at the time. In fact, McGirr pointed out that he was actually looking quite a lot at Mary Quant, the designer and 1960s poster girl credited with dreaming up the miniskirt. He gave his minis a 2026 spin by slinging them low on the hips and adding giant cargo pockets, cutting their sweetness with a bit of bite.
McGirr’s tailoring was suitably sharp. The jacket with a single hook-and-eye closure below the breasts was modelled after a similar style in McQueen’s much more provocative spring 1997 La Poupée collection. The style with the buttons marching diagonally across the torso and a similarly cut trench were lifted from fall 1996’s Dante, a show that’s remembered for the skeleton sitting in the front row. Naturally, McGirr also did the de rigueur skeleton scarf, softening it up in shades of lavender and cargo green.
The evening dresses were the least resolved part of the collection, often sheer and unstructured where McQueen’s, at his best, ravished with their details while remaining light and feminine. Staff cuts could be to blame: the company lost 20% of its employees to lay-offs in late 2025, which is not so easy to overcome. One thing the late designer may have liked the look of: a peplumed top hand-crocheted from little rings and lurex yarn that represents the collective effort of McGirr and his team. He described it as “almost like a new idea of chainmail.”
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