Four weeks ago Sean McGirr walked Alexander McQueen back onto the London schedule for the first time since 2001. On Thursday the house said he was leaving.
The statement was short. After three years as creative director, McGirr is stepping down. New creative leadership will be announced in due course. No successor was named, and no reason was given beyond the fact of the departure.
The timing is what catches. His spring/summer 2027 show in September was built as a return. McQueen was born in London in the Nineties and left the city's calendar in 2001. McGirr staged the homecoming inside Lincoln's Inn Chapel, candlelight and stone, and talked about what it meant to bring the house back to where it started. A month later he is the one walking out.
The chapter
McGirr arrived at McQueen in 2023 from JW Anderson. Before that he had passed through Dries Van Noten, Burberry and the Uniqlo studio under Christophe Lemaire, and he came out of the master's course at Central Saint Martins. He took the house from Sarah Burton, who had been there for twenty-six years, first as an intern, then as Lee McQueen's right hand, then as the designer who led it after his death in 2010.
Following Burton was never going to be simple. She had spent more than a decade softening the house into something romantic and wearable. McGirr went the other way. He talked about the label's assertive, hedonistic streak and described himself as a student of youth culture. He pulled Lee McQueen's signatures toward a younger buyer, kept the tailoring sharp, and let the darkness back into the set design.
The reviews ran hot and cold across his six collections. Some read the early shows as a designer still looking for the register. The September show was the one that landed. It crossed the neoclassical calm of a Piero della Francesca panel with the energy of a rave, and it read as a designer who had finally decided what his McQueen sounded like.
Kering's year
The exit does not stand on its own. McQueen sits inside Kering, and the group has spent the year moving its designers around. Demna left Balenciaga for Gucci. Anthony Vaccarello left Saint Laurent earlier this month after a decade. Now McQueen is open too. The houses are being reset at close to the same time, under a group working through a change of its own leadership.
For McQueen the practical questions start now. A creative director who had just defined his direction is gone before the collection reaches the stores. The spring/summer 2027 clothes will arrive carrying his name while the house looks for the person who comes next. Whoever that is inherits a London homecoming they did not stage.
He brought the house home in September. By October the homecoming had an ending he did not write.
The Splendid EditThere is a pattern worth noting in how these departures land. A designer spends two or three seasons building toward a point of view, reaches it, and leaves before the market has a chance to answer. McGirr got his clearest show on the board and then the news came. The clothes will be judged without him in the room.
From Sean McGirr's final McQueen show, spring/summer 2027 in London. Courtesy of Fashion PR Firm
What McGirr leaves is a house back on its home schedule and a single collection that showed where he wanted to take it. The next name will decide whether that direction holds or starts again. For now the chapel is dark and the schedule has a gap where the show used to be.