For Seán McGirr’s cool—and accomplished—McQueen resort collection, all razor sharp tailoring, heiress portrait necklines, and tartan, he looked to the images of British society photographer Dafydd Jones, who regularly shot for posher than posh Tatler magazine. Specifically McGirr was thinking of Jones’s book, England: The Last Hurrah, published in 2018, which featured the aristocracy at play in the 1980s, with Jones acting as a lens on the wall as the Bright Young Things of that era cavorted at coming out parties, hunt balls, grand weddings, and university shindigs, all taffeta, tuxes, tiaras, and tousled Hugh Grant hair—oh, and with a glorious, if skewering, dishevelment and abandon as Jones documented night raucously turning into day. It was all very Brideshead Revisited, or The Line of Beauty, or Saltburn, just without the homicide and the bathwater.
McGirr first saw Jones’s images via Tumblr, and it was his college tutor who told him to go look at the book. What attracted McGirr to them all over again was, he said, “this sense that, economically, socially, we’re going back to the ’80s; it’s all about chaos. Also, of course, the attitude. It’s just so England, you know?” And in the way you have to when you’ve taken on the mantle of a house which no longer has its founder, you’re looking to find a connection to that person, in this case, Alexander Lee McQueen. McGirr mentioned that McQueen himself, brought up in the hardscrabble East London, ended up close to the likes of grande dames Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness, this despite the fact that while Jones’s images were being taken, “Lee was a teenager, and maybe in his bedroom listening to George Michael.” That’s the other thing about a house like McQueen; you need to be able to spin a narrative. “I’m Irish,” said McGirr, laughing. “We’re storytellers.”
What this lends to McGirr’s McQueen is something the label has long explored: the tension between romanticism and rebellion—and a dissection of the twin impulses of British style, the desire to dress up, and the punkish rejection of the very same. What McGirr has been rapidly proving at McQueen is his ability to subvert the technical language of tailoring. This collection is chock full of terrific reinterpretations of classic smokings regardless of gender, shrunken in silhouette, or with twisted revers —“I didn’t want them to feel flat,” he said, “but to have some energy”—and a preponderance of cummerbund waistlines. The tartan McQueen used in his own collections is here, if employed sparingly, as a high-necked mini dress and a corduroy-collared coat perfect for stomping across the manor grounds. So too are other such British-isms as Argyle sweaters (worn with low-slung trousers), and the Stewart tartan as a draped kilt, all of which might be accessorized with chandelier shards as jewelry. (Once you’ve swung from the chandeliers, you might as well wear them.)
Other elements of this collection are from closer to home. McGirr has been judiciously finding what he connects with, responds to, loves. That might mean looking again at the poppy print dress Karen Elson wore in the label’s spring 2004 show, Deliverance, now reworked into an asymmetric chiffon dress or elegant suit. The silky scarf skull of yore also pops up as a dress, or gleams from gothy-clubby jewelry. And with an eye to what looks good to his generation, McGirr has revived the 2010 Manta bag. Like much of what is on offer here, it’s a little bit of a romanticized past, a soupcon of the fast and furious present, and a headlong dive into the future.
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