What a fabulous decision by Kering Group CEO Luca de Meo to sanction the return of McQueen to its point of origin: London. No disrespect to Paris, but there is a specificity to the messily inspirational chaos of the British capital that is also inherent to this house, one of its greatest fashion offspring.
House and home were reunited tonight in the Undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, a 17th century chamber whose flagstone floor was etched with the names of long-gone spymasters, lawyers and preachers whose bones lay under it. The star-pattern lierne vaulting of the Gothic ceiling above was divinely beautiful. Between them, once the crowd had settled on their plain wooden benches, Seán McGirr presented a new incarnation of McQueen that crackled with the freedom and contradictions of its native city. “It’s that clashing of things,” he said.
More precisely, McGirr was working to articulate his expression of McQueen between the neoclassically sacred and the chemically profane. These two poles were represented, at one end, by Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, which McGirr became obsessed with as a student newly arrived in London, and, at the other, by the city’s rave culture.
House suiting with closed-over shoulders built to resemble furled angel wings was worn beneath hair twin-peaked to recall the demonically energised silhouette of Keith Flint. Suiting created by longtime McQueen collaborator—and Lee McQueen’s own tailor—Huntsman was sketched by McGirr to recall the radically disruptive silhouette of Tommy Nutter, whom he described as “the first rebel of Savile Row.” This precisely fitted tailoring was lent an extra dimension of discipline by the thick leather collars that signalled a transition from Nutter to ‘off your nut’ (a quaint English expression for being in an enhanced state in a nightclub).
McGirr shaped sometimes grandiosely classic gowns, then spiked them with stimulatingly anarchic enhancements. These included harnesses by OG McQueen collaborator Shaun Leane, warped shapes thrown in stretched fabric across the bodices of lacquered satin gowns, and open-backed corsets that flew above the shoulder-line. Collisions of diffuse colour recalled the seared-retina glitching of a night in the lights. There was a fantastic dress of interlinked, hand-embroidered metal skulls, each as individual as the bodies lying beneath the models’ platformed feet.
Metallic leaves were embellished onto garments in random drifts, flung against the tailoring and dresses as if caught there in a gust. Mesh, perforated leather and colour-piped sporty knitted shorts and skirts edged the collection towards true ravewear. Jacquards were shadowed, overlaid and interfered with until their decorative integrity seemed on the edge of collapse.
McGirr seems more angel than demon, but he understands that McQueen is a house in which darkness has often proved creatively generative. He said: “You can talk about the dark stuff. You can let it into your work, but you shouldn’t let it into your life: you should have a good time.” This collection danced in the shadows in search of euphoria.
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