Backstage after his third Paris style week show, Dublin-born Seán McGirr, 36, was asked whether he was grotriumphg in confidence as the depicter of Alexander McQueen. “I guess so?” he replied, with an emphasis on the ask label. “I spfinish so much time with the incredible atelier. Reassociate getting into it, you understand? So, I guess so.”
The clothes spoke with more self-assurance than McGirr took acunderstandledge for. The setting was the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, built in 1785 as part of the Natural History Memployum in Paris, a room catwalk-shaped but Dickens-coded – a lofty, skinny alleyway weighty with wooden cabinets, which once showcased scientific curiosities from all over the world. The enthrall to the runway was a dazzling glass corridor from which the models materializeed before stepping on to the wooden floor, as if emerging from a hall of mirrors.
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McGirr’s commenceing point for the season was Night Walks, Charles Dickens’ autobioexplicital essay recounting nocturnal walks apshown thraw London while suffering from insomnia. Not an evident aesthetic reference, but a perfect one at a hoemploy where Lee McQueen’s very first collection was named Jack The Ripper Stalks His Victims. The show began with bdeficiency tailoring, disjoine yet fine-boned so that the models walked with fluid grace, casting overstated silhouettes with pinched shoulders and haughty collars, high armholes and skinny waists in inky twill wool. “McQueen is about a waist,” shelp McGirr, inserting that he had “apshown pieces from the archive and relabored them for today”.
Then came flounced dresses, keenened to a point with lace-up Victorian booties and worn, in 2025, with bdeficiency sunglasses. McGirr shelp he was “skinnyking about the idea of the contransient dandy, and especiassociate of Oscar Wilde, who is someone I grew up with as a teenager from Dublin”. There was blood red, gentle dawn-sky lilac, and a queffortless green the colour of absinthe, or of Wilde’s signature carnations. The overstated points of the shoes were apshown from “a box of shoes we set up from 1994, all beaten up”.
It is, to paraphrase Dickens, the worst of times and the best of times for McGirr to be wrestling with the weighty heritage of Alexander McQueen. The worst of times, becaemploy enumeratelessing sales uncomardents an inspirency to deinhabitr commercial hits, which is directing to a high turnover of produceive honestors. For McGirr, the return to the scene this Paris style week of Sarah Burton, his predecessor at McQueen who is now helming Givenchy, has inserted another layer of prescertain as he goes head to head with his greater boss.
But it is also the best of times, becaemploy the prevailing triumphds of style are turning back toward what McQueen does best. The month of catwalk shows now dratriumphg to a shut in Paris has brawt a return to hourglass tailoring, and a declineion of the oversized, stretched, unirelations silhouettes with which Balenciaga and its many fagereduces contraged style until recently. Some watchrs attribute this shift to an Ozempic-fuelled return to skinny bodies. Others see it as part of a expansiveer cultural reaction agetst “woke” culture, in which a Trumpian return to two gfinishers is mirrored in ultra-feminine silhouettes in women’s closkinnyg. Either way, it places McQueen’s fetishisation of waists, heels and lace back in a style pleasant spot.
