Seán McGirr has brought McQueen home to London, where the house’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection arrived bearing all the familiar signs of its illustrious parentage: immaculate tailoring, severe shoulders, gothic ornament and enough theatrical hardware to reassure anyone worried that the brand had forgotten its name. The workmanship looks magnificent. The trouble is that the collection seems to have mistaken looking like McQueen for thinking like McQueen. What remains is not a watered-down version of the brand, but a dumbed-down one.
The distinction matters. Because it’s not so much a question of whether the collection was recognizably McQueen or not – it is. McGirr has retained the intensity of the surface: the sculptural jackets, exposed bodies, metallic embellishments and deliberate collisions of hard and soft. But it’s more so the absence of any intellectual impulse that made those codes necessary in the first place. McQueen S/S 2027 had basically nothing to say beyond the surface. McGirr’s clothes never seem to have any particular point to make, because the clothes are the point. McQueen’s visual vocabulary is present but purely in the literal, visual sense.
None of this is to slight the people making the clothes. McGirr enlisted Savile Row’s Huntsman for sharply engineered suiting and reunited the house with Shaun Leane, whose metalwork once helped articulate Lee McQueen’s more unsettling fantasies. A dress of interlinked, embroidered metal skulls is the kind of object that demands attention; the angel-wing shoulders are a serious exercise in construction, however literally conceived. The craft is formidable. But technical virtuosity cannot, by itself, give a collection a worldview. A perfectly made sentence can still say nothing.
What’s annoying is that McGirr did indeed draw from an intellectually rich inspiration. His proposed collision between the serene transcendence of Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ and the disorderly freedom of London’s rave culture is a legitimately fascinating proposal. It sounds irresistible: sacred surrender confronting secular abandon; spiritual release meeting chemically-induced escape; two communities seeking an experience beyond the individual self. You could make a brilliant collection out of these contradictions, affinities and hypocrisies of those worlds. Lee himself tackled these themes. McGirr, however, largely makes angel wings and club-kid styling.
Beyond the literal intepretation, does McGirr actually have an underlying opinion on these contradictions? What does he actually think about the relationship between religious transcendence and secular hedonism? Why are these worlds being brought together? What does their collision reveal about the people inhabiting them? The clothes offer little indication. These are the questions Lee built his brand to answer. But to McGirrl, the painting becomes a silhouette, the rave becomes an accessory, and the supposed tension dissolves into an attractive mood board. Of course, designers don’t owe us a pretentious philosophical treatise every season. But when the creative director of McQueen starts waffling about “transcendence”, one expects him to have something more substantial to say than ‘angel shoulders.’
Consider Highland Rape, Lee McQueen’s Fall/Winter 95/96 collection. Drawing on his interpretation of England’s treatment of Scotland, and resisting the picturesque romanticization of Scottish dress, he slashed garments, distressed lace and exposed the body. The violence of his historical perspective was embedded in the physical treatment of the clothes. One may dispute the show’s methods or conclusions, but its construction was inseparable from its argument. Tartan was not simply an interesting print spotted during research. The clothes were what happened when an opinion took form.
That is not a demand for McGirr to stage another Highland Rape, resurrect Lee’s darkness or even borrow his politics. Quite the reverse. Give the religious painting and the rave to a designer with a genuinely independent perspective and I would rather see something utterly unrecognizable as McQueen than another competent simulation of Lee’s output. Fidelity to a house’s spirit cannot be measured by the number of familiar silhouettes it can reproduce. An iconoclast does not honor another iconoclast by learning his tricks and performing them on command.
Sarah Burton, too, often seemed most at ease refining the house’s extraordinary material inheritance, though her work had its own narrative and emotional intelligence. McGirr’s problem is more acute. Across several seasons, his gestures toward rebellion have too often arrived as literal archival references. McGirr is not a budding designer. We can’t use the same novice cliches about him “settling in” or “finding his feet”. If he had the creative foresight and audacity that gave McQueen its cultural force then there would already be unmistakable signs of it. But there isn’t.
McGirr is hardly operating in a vacuum, however. Kering’s stated strategy is strictly attempting to refocus McQueen on a British sartorial identity, especially women’s ready-to-wear, tailoring and eveningwear, with more concentrated collections and a leaner operation. S/S 2027 is strikingly legible within those parameters: exquisite jackets, occasion dresses, instantly identifiable codes and reassuring demonstrations of heritage craftsmanship. There is no evidence that an executive ordered McGirr to suppress an inconvenient idea. Nor is commercial discipline inherently hostile to great fashion; Lee was a master tailor working within a business himself.
But the strategy may help explain why this particular creative shortcoming may not be a priority to the institution. A recognizable McQueen shoulder can be developed, merchandised, photographed and sold. A genuinely iconoclastic point of view is harder to forecast, and harder still to fit neatly into a product plan. But, that does not excuse McGirr: he has had time to show what he would do with the house, and this collection gives us another handsome assortment of McQueen-isms thrown onto some nice tailoring.
Perhaps the most depressing thing about this zombie McQueen is how little it asks of anyone. The craftsmanship is admirable; the references are eminently explainable. The house celebrates the legacy of a thinker and iconoclast while treating his signatures as the entirety of his achievement. It has learned how to keep Lee McQueen’s clothes moving long after the thoughts behind them have stopped. The McQueen woman still looks like a rebel. But she’s completely incapable of telling you what she’s rebelling against.
