Sixteen years after Lee Alexander McQueen sent models down a runway that looked like an alien seabed — their bodies digitally printed with jellyfish and manta rays, their feet locked into the armadillo shoes that would define an era — the house has returned to the water. This time, it is a bag that carries the narrative. And Tim Walker who tells the story.
The campaign, released this week, marks McQueen’s first ever dedicated bag campaign. Its subject is the Manta — a sharply sculpted, architecturally folded leather bag whose angular geometry draws directly from the form of a manta ray in motion. The bag is not new to the house’s vocabulary. It was originally the De Manta, introduced in McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2010 collection, Plato’s Atlantis — a show widely considered one of the most important runway presentations ever staged, not merely for its clothes but for its ambition to reimagine fashion as a complete environment, biological, digital, and philosophical all at once.
That the house has chosen this particular bag, from this particular collection, for its first standalone campaign is a statement of intent. Under creative director Séan McGirr, McQueen is reaching back to the most visionary corners of its archive — not to replicate them, but to draw a line from what the house once proposed to what it might yet become.
The bag: geometry as instinct
The Manta, in its current form, retains the angular folds and sharp sculptural lines of the original De Manta, but the proportions have been refined. The silhouette is sleeker, the leather work more precise. Available in smooth black, red, and metallic gunmetal leather, the bag reads as both minimal and dramatic — a contradiction that sits at the heart of the McQueen sensibility. There is customisation, too: pearl, crystal, and chandelier chain charms can be added to the bag’s hardware, introducing an element of personal ornamentation that recalls the house’s couture-era attention to surface detail.
What makes the Manta compelling as a design object is the way it holds tension. The folds are architectural, almost origami-like, but the leather is soft enough to yield under the hand. It is a bag that looks rigid in photographs and proves supple in person — a quality that Tim Walker, characteristically, seems to have understood and worked against.
Plato’s Atlantis proposed that fashion could be an ecosystem — biological, digital, philosophical. Sixteen years later, the Manta carries that proposition in leather and light.
The Splendid EditThe campaign: calm and chaos
Walker’s images place model Vivien Solari beneath the surface of crystal-clear water, her strawberry-hued hair fanning out around her like the tendrils of some luminous sea creature. The Manta floats beside her, or is held loosely in her grip, its angular form counterpointed by the organic, undulating movement of water and hair and fabric. These are not fashion photographs in any conventional commercial sense. They are closer to the kind of subaquatic tableaux Walker has built throughout his career — dreamlike, carefully constructed, resistant to the quick scroll.
Set designer Gary Card, whose work with Walker stretches back more than a decade, created the campaign’s otherworldly waterscape. The environment is light-dappled and fluid but deliberately constructed — every ripple of light considered, every colour calibrated. Card has spoken before about the importance of building sets that feel simultaneously natural and impossible, and that tension is present in every frame. The water appears real. The world it describes does not.
Art direction comes from SJ Todd, working under McGirr’s creative direction. The collaboration between Walker, Card, and Todd produces images that feel less like a product campaign and more like the opening frames of a film whose plot you can’t quite predict — which is precisely the effect a house like McQueen should be aiming for. McGirr has described the campaign as an exploration of “McQueen’s enduring relationship with nature” and “an energy at the threshold between calm and chaos.” The phrase is apt. Walker’s Solari is serene, suspended, but the water around her hums with latent motion. Something is about to happen. Nothing does. That is the power of the image.
The Manta, sixteen years after Plato’s Atlantis. Photography by Tim Walker, courtesy of McQueen
McGirr’s McQueen: building a vocabulary
It is worth placing this campaign within the broader context of Séan McGirr’s tenure at the house. Since his appointment, McGirr has pursued a strategy that is neither revivalist nor iconoclastic. He has not attempted to recreate the theatrical intensity of McQueen’s own shows, nor has he sought to erase the house’s heritage in favour of a wholly new direction. Instead, he has been quietly building a vocabulary — identifying the threads in the archive that feel most alive, most capable of carrying new meaning, and pulling them forward into contemporary collections and campaigns.
The choice of the De Manta as the vehicle for this first bag campaign is characteristic of that approach. It is an archival piece, but it is not nostalgic. It carries the DNA of Plato’s Atlantis — the fascination with marine biology, the belief that nature and technology are not opposites but collaborators — without requiring the viewer to have seen the original show or to understand its references. The bag works on its own terms. The campaign contextualises it within a larger story.
Commissioning Tim Walker is equally telling. Walker’s photography shares something fundamental with McQueen’s design philosophy: a commitment to world-building, a refusal to treat fashion imagery as mere documentation of clothes. Walker does not photograph garments. He photographs environments in which garments exist. For a house whose founder believed that a collection should be an experience — emotional, spatial, narrative — there is perhaps no more natural collaborator.
The Manta campaign does not announce itself as a turning point or a grand statement. It arrives, instead, with the quiet confidence of a house that knows what it holds in its archive and is beginning to understand how to use it. The water is clear. The geometry is sharp. Somewhere between the two, McQueen is finding its new surface.
Photography by Tim Walker, courtesy of McQueen / 10 Magazine