Camden calling: McQueen’s homecoming salutes the London teenager
For spring/summer 2027, Seán McGirr returned McQueen to London with a collection shaped by the city of his youth, from Camden rave culture and goth glamour to Savile Row tailoring. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
This season, McQueen relocated its show from Paris to London Fashion Week. The move was part of a strategic reset under new CEO Gianfranco D’Attis, who wants to reconnect the house with its British roots and creative heritage. Presented under the vaulted ceilings of the New Hall at Lincoln’s Inn, the show unfolded like a party in the underbelly of a Gothic Revival church. “I wanted to bring these two worlds together and create this kind of tension between them,” Seán McGirr said after the show.
“Bringing McQueen back to its roots in London, it kind of hit in a different way. I started thinking about when I moved to London as a teenager; what I loved,” he explained. “It brought me to the National Gallery. There’s a painting by Piero della Francesca, the Baptism of Christ, and that was the starting point. This painting for me represents the idea of transcendence and serenity. They were two words that I couldn’t get out of my mind when I was creating the collection.”
Dated around 1448–1450, the painting’s influence on the collection was more emotional than graphic, although the draped, diaphanous sensibility of some of McGirr’s evening dresses had a touch of baptism cloth to them. Instead, he amplified the collection’s religious undertones, fashioning his models’ hair into devil horns, threading bondage elements through the styling, and evoking the house’s skull motif in evening dress embroidery.
Backstage, McGirr referenced Cyberdog – the Camden purveyor of futuristic rave clubwear – where he used to buy T-shirts as a teenager. Armour shoes took inspiration from a Lee McQueen bag from 2006, and Huntsman collaborated on heritage tailoring with a punkish attitude, partly inspired by the flamboyant Savile Row suiting of Tommy Nutter, the great 1960s dandy tailor.
The clash of influences gave the collection the teenager-in-London spirit McGirr described: tailoring, clubwear, goth elements and cyber accents all jumbled together with the free and fun naivety of youth. At McQueen, McGirr is less interested in the deeply psychological, sinister parts of the house’s emotional legacy than in distilling its darkness into a kind of glamour that might speak more immediately to a present-day young clientele.
In the seventeen years Kane designed his eponymous brand, his collections nearly always iterated on a single idea, turning it inside-out and upside-down, until it became warped, weird and wondrous. In a futuristic white hall at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, he approached his Mulberry debut with the same methodology, focusing on the notches of the flaps of the emblematic Bayswater bag. Like the crenellations of medieval fortresses, he applied the motif anywhere he could: to the edges and hems of leather coats, skirts and tops; in tiers on leather and changeant-textile mini-dresses and skirts; and in knitwear.
It was a bold proposition that felt almost like a new way of branding Mulberry. No one else has hems like that. Contrary to the subject matters of his previous work, the geometric shapes were more of a constructional study than a psychological one, which made for a soberer expression than the often sexually-charged collections of his past. But the choice reminded us of Kane’s unpredictability. Going into his shows, you never knew what he was going to do to you. At Mulberry, he’s already continuing that tradition. As a perhaps cheeky nod to the brand’s tree logo and the clean slate embodied by his presence, he named his new bags the Chop and the Axe and shaped them accordingly.
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