McGirr’s McQueen: 6 Months With The Young Designer Making London’s Fabled Fashion House His Own
A year ago, Seán McGirr arrived to lead McQueen into the future. The young designer tells Hayley Maitland what it took to get there – and what the road ahead has in store.
By Hayley Maitland, Photography by Campbell Addy
16 December 2024
There’s been nothing but rain all week in Paris – it’s rained until every plane tree in the Tuileries shed its leaves – but on the night Seán McGirr presents his spring/summer 2025 collection for McQueen across the Seine from the Louvre, the city is bathed in a golden September light. Perhaps that’s helping the 36-year-old Dubliner – plucked from the JW Anderson studio less than a year ago – look so composed as he takes François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of the Kering group, which owns McQueen, through rail after rail of heritage designs and explains, in his gentle Irish lilt, how he’s contorted them: Jermyn Street tuxedo shirts with curlicue collars; communion dresses in provocative, translucent crepe; rugby tops made camp with Etonian frills.
Then again, perhaps McGirr’s air of calm is merely relative. With less than 20 minutes until showtime in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the paparazzi calls accompanying each VIP arrival echo around the neoclassical courtyard. Backstage, McQueen staffers with pincushion armbands are moving so quickly that the tape measures thrown over their shoulders trail behind them like streamers; models in bathrobes stand to attention; and, in a corner of the room, embroiderers are trimming the silver threads of the banshee headdress that will close the show.
Even amid the tumult, this last detail is arresting – at once a tribute to London’s nocturnal rebels and a nod to Alexander “Lee” McQueen’s own banshees from his autumn/winter 1994 presentation (his second-ever runway show) at the Café de Paris nightclub in Leicester Square. Tonight, though, there are more security personnel guarding the École’s towering wrought-iron gates than there were showgoers three decades ago. I step outside just as Salma Hayek arrives, the paparazzi flashes making a disco ball of her sequin dress in the gloaming – and when I return, McGirr has slipped away backstage to steel himself for the industry’s judgment.
In the months I shadowed the designer over the past year – between his debut in March and his pivotal sophomore collection in September – it was only in the immediate lead-up to the latter show that he betrayed the pressure he was under. “I came in this morning and at 7am called my right hand and said, ‘We need to break everything down and build it all back up,’ ” he’d told me, with his usual buoyancy, less than 72 hours earlier. We were perched on a nondescript sofa on the third floor of McQueen’s Saint-Germain temporary studio, surrounded by model boards and button trays. Even though McGirr, a self-confessed “Fashion Week smoker”, had likely had more Marlboro Golds than hours of sleep in the preceding days, he was full of enthusiasm about everything – from the Birdee heels he’d designed with a mohawk of leather feathers to a newly developed cobweb lace inspired by Louise Bourgeois. He has classic Irish colouring – fair skin, dark hair and Atlantic blue eyes – and gives the impression of being forever in motion. Today he’s dressed in a tie-dyed McQueen T-shirt with an upside-down skull embroidered dead in the middle of the chest, skinny jeans and sneakers. “I’ve been busy wearing a lot of McQueen,” he says. “It’s important to see how the fit is, and to improve things as well: sometimes things don’t turn out how you thought.” His elfin features are punctuated by a dimple in his right cheek that emerges when he smiles, which he does freely and often.
If he’s disarmingly warm, though, he’s also exacting. On the floors below us, the ateliers are, under his instruction, knitting skull masks from ivory cashmere and hand-shredding yards of organza to give the impression of shearling. The team had just finished three days of fittings when McGirr decided, overnight, to refit everything – not for the sake of throwing a spanner in the works, he assures me, but simply to make sure that every last T-bar detail worked as intended. It’s a process drilled into him by Louise Wilson, the legendary human crucible for design genius at Central Saint Martins. (Among Wilson’s other protégés: Christopher Kane, Jonathan Saunders, Simone Rocha – and, yes, Lee McQueen, who was in her first graduating class, in 1992; McGirr was in her last before she died, in 2014.)
“In tutorials, she’d be like, ‘No, it’s not right… It’s not right yet’ – but in the most profane language imaginable, like a football hooligan,” McGirr recalls. It was the greatest test of endurance he’s ever been through. “She’d be like: ‘f*cking do the job. Just do it.’ It’s very practical.”
When Kering announced, in 2023, that Sarah Burton would step away from McQueen, many wondered whether any designer from outside of the storied house could really do the job. If the fashion industry likes to speak of codes, McQueen’s is a uniquely difficult one for a creative director to crack. February 2025 may mark 15 years since Lee’s death, but his emotional hold on the culture at large is ongoing: his Highland r*pe and The Hunger shows still linger in the minds of Gen X editors as ’90s fashion at its most electrifying; meanwhile, millennials who would struggle to tell a 2.55 from a Lady Dior waited up to six hours in thousand-strong queues to see Savage Beauty at The V&A, and Gen Z TikTokers are making McQueen’s 2003 skull scarves their entire personality (despite some not yet being born when Karen Elson sashayed down the runway with one tied to her pirate breeches).
Of course, Lee McQueen’s is a hard story to forget, his contradictions endlessly mythologised: here was a Savile Row apprentice who used the pattern-cutting he’d learnt making English drape suits to invent the infamous Bumster trouser; who yearned for extreme reactions to his designs (“I’d rather people left my shows and vomited,” he once said. “I want heart attacks. I want ambulances”) but also launched a range of prom dresses with Target; whose East End origins and Celtic heritage fuelled collections that ripped classism and empire to shreds, yet whose legacy is irrevocably bound up with British blue bloods like Isabella Blow or Stella Tennant.
McGirr, who is as pledged to the cult of Lee as anyone – he’s recently been studying Blow’s 1989 wedding at Gloucester Cathedral, and Tennant remains his favourite model of all time – hopes to restore some of the playful aggression the house had in its infancy. “There’s a sort of intellectual kinkiness, which I quite like,” he told me shortly after he had landed the job. “It’s not overtly sexy at all – and I think that’s really modern.” During his frequent visits to the house’s King’s Cross archives this year, he bypassed more commercial Noughties collections to focus on Lee’s earliest drawings. “There’s this confidence in his line drawing that is like, wow – it’s razor sharp, almost architectural.” At the same time, McGirr notes, “There’s also a new generation that couldn’t get into McQueen – you know what I mean?” I do. While the house under Burton gracefully matured and refined its proposition, McGirr wants his McQueen to be about youthful energy and what he calls “the animal within”.
None of which is to say that he doesn’t have a “deep, deep respect” for Burton, Lee’s right hand from the time of her own degree at Saint Martins, and the ways she made the house her own during her 13-year stint as creative director. If Lee claimed to have stitched expletives into the linings of the then Prince of Wales’s Anderson & Sheppard suits – and pubic hair into the hats of the Queen’s Beefeaters – Burton unfurled nine feet of satin gazar on the steps of Westminster Abbey as Miss Catherine Middleton married into the house of Windsor in 2011. And while Lee’s moodboards featured the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom and Hans Bellmer’s dismembered dolls, Burton’s inspirations were the Taatit rugs of the Shetland Islands and the blue flax fields of Northern Ireland. For McGirr the challenge is to build on the execution perfected by the latter while capturing the energy and edginess of the former. “McQueen is all about tensions,” he says: between attraction and repulsion, refinement and brutality – and, yes, the avant-garde and the commercially viable. As Lee himself said, when the press eviscerated him for his debut Givenchy collection: “It’s f*cking hard to be both at the same time.” Backstage in Paris, I’m wondering if it’s even possible, as the banshee headpiece is reunited with its dress on a mannequin – when a McQueen publicist in a Motorola headset appears at my elbow.
“We’re about to begin,” she whispers. “Please, take your seat.”
Thirty-three years since its founder began cutting up fabrics in a pokey South London flat, the house of McQueen’s headquarters now inhabit a six-story, 30,000-square-foot building in London’s Clerkenwell. When I first visit, on an overcast July day less than three months before the spring show, McGirr – having moved his workspace down from the corporate level to be closer to his design team – is sprawled on the blond pine floor, inspecting a range of materials for resort 2025’s sunglasses. (McGirr’s approach to design in general, he says, is very “on the floor” – there’s not a safety-pin brooch that goes into production without his fingerprints on the sample.) He likes a kind of monarch butterfly print – “Very McQueen, no?” he says, holding it up for me to inspect – less so the malachite, which he finds too Gucci. He’s “not opposed to a pair of flame sunglasses”, he adds, with his dimpled grin. He’d seen them on a research trip to LA, where he became enamoured with the opiumcore scene and the brazen style of some Playboi Carti fans on Melrose.
If youth is a creative touchstone for McGirr, it’s also worth noting how much he respects experience. “McQueen is so much about the atelier,” he insists, and while he’s brought in some of his own designers and cutters, much of the team that worked under Burton is still in place, some of them remaining from Lee’s days. His aim is to use their technical mastery to bring a frisson of daring back to British fashion. “I think of McQueen as a lab for experimentation, for creativity. I say it to my design team, ‘Play around – push ideas until they’re strong and feel like they go somewhere else.’”
It’s McGirr’s realisation, through engaging with Lee’s ideas and work, that you could “say something through clothes, and that was really important”, that led him to move from Dublin to England after finishing high school in 2007, enrolling to study menswear at the London College of Fashion – though the hedonism of the city quickly proved more of a revelation than his courses. His student apartment was just across from the Camden music venue Koko in the days when Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty were often found beneath its giant glitter ball – influences easily apparent on his moodboards. To make ends meet, he worked nights as a bartender-slash-promoter for a gay bar on Soho’s Wardour Street, where he would spot the likes of Kate Moss and Allegra Versace being trailed by paparazzi. (“I was like, ‘Oh my God!’”)
It’s during this period, too, that he really began to embrace his sexuality. “It sucks for all gay kids to come out, especially if you don’t really fit in in school,” he says, although he’s quick to note that his parents have always been extremely supportive. Now, though? “I’m so happy to be gay,” he tells me. “I thank God every day – I love what gay people did before me, and the sacrifices they made, and I’m always super engaged with all these prolific gay artists – Kenneth Anger, Derek Jarman, Susan Sontag, Peter Hujar. I feel like it’s my obligation to represent gay people, speak for them and support them.”
While McGirr worked in the West End – he’s never, he tells me, had enough money to feel relaxed about it – he preferred the club scene in McQueen’s native East End. It’s through nights at Boombox and Ponystep that he first heard of Wilson and became fixated on studying with her. After landing an interview and surviving her predictably brutal questioning, he heard her calling after him down the hallway as he made his exit: “‘Oi, Irish boy! There’s a scholarship that you should apply for now, because I know you f*cking students: you’re so lazy and you miss out on these things.’ That was her way of being like, ‘I’m going to give you a scholarship so you can afford to study.’”
That scholarship kept him going financially. When he graduated from Saint Martins in 2014, he did so with a collection of jeans he had scrawled on with a ballpoint pen, inspired by Piccadilly hustlers and River Phoenix’s character in My Own Private Idaho. Candy Nippon, a Tokyo boutique, bought the collection in full.
If there’s a through-line to McGirr’s life over the next decade, it’s living in the epicentre of cities and making a study of their youth culture. When Uniqlo hired him out of school, he moved into a tiny apartment in Tokyo’s Shibuya, browsing Tsutaya’s bookshelves until 2am and marvelling at Harajuku’s kawaii scene. Two and a half years later, he relocated to Paris to work more closely with Christophe Lemaire on his Uniqlo capsules, living in a shoebox apartment near the Palais-Royal, spending his free hours photographing young kids and skaters on Rue Léon Cladel. (Until 2023, McGirr identified as both designer and photographer, winning a prize for his pictures and publishing a book of them.) From there, Antwerp beckoned when he landed a job at Dries Van Noten (his first collection was the label’s frothy collaboration with Christian Lacroix) before returning to London – first as head of menswear at JW Anderson, then as head of womenswear too.
The atmosphere in McGirr’s McQueen studio is markedly democratic. While he has his own office, which is filled with military chairs from the 1940s, he’s rarely in it, preferring to be with the team while casting, designing, fitting. McGirr can, over the course of a single conversation, reference Caravaggio’s “Madonna dei Pellegrini”, the contemporary programming at Tokyo’s SCAI The Bathhouse and photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s distinctly American ennui. It’s one of the reasons why Pinault felt instinctively that he would be right for the job. “Seán exemplifies a new generation of creativity in British fashion,” he says. “His vibrant energy and passion for couture and tailoring – and his rich background in art and music – resonate perfectly with the spirit of McQueen.” And yet McGirr sees art and fashion as distinct entities. Art, he says, comes from a singular person, while fashion is generally produced by a team – in McQueen’s current iteration, one that extends from Clerkenwell to tailors in Italy, fabric makers in the North of England, merchandisers in Korea and far beyond. “I’m not making clothes for a museum,” McGirr tells me more than once. “It’s really important that people wear things.” Given the turbulent state of the world lately, he hopes his designs can be a form of modern armour: “It’s almost like a way of surviving, wearing McQueen.”
There’s still plenty of room for lightness in McGirr’s universe, though. Today everyone in the atelier is invited to weigh in on whether a zebra-print fabric is too “Patsy Stone” (the tragicomic fashionista from the Absolutely Fabulous series) and whether an abstracted houndstooth is too “Tati”, referring to the checked pattern of a French chain store. Much, admittedly, is still in flux: the walls are lined with moodboards pinned with images of Siouxsie Sioux and Plum Sykes, but I soon learn that the collection’s direction has shifted again, while McQueen’s factories wait to get started on production. If the concept of the banshee has begun to crystallise in McGirr’s mind, there’s nothing yet to see in terms of clothes – just rail after rail of vintage for research, from an olive green leather trench to a cream rayon cape embellished with sequin lightning bolts that Ziggy Stardust might have worn. As McGirr will admit to me later on, “You need a bit of time to understand who you are within the framework of this kind of brand, which has never really had a new creative director.”
I try to figure out how much time he’s actually had. It’s July, and in the months since McGirr’s appointment was announced, he’s produced a 52-look autumn/winter collection, attempted to meet the scores of people working underneath him, overseen a 31-look resort offering, started the spring/summer collection – and weathered two PR storms.
The internet met the news of his arrival in October 2023 with a tiled, black and white image of McGirr next to Kering’s five other creative leads at the time: Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent, Demna at Balenciaga, Sabato De Sarno at Gucci, Norbert Stumpfl at Brioni and Matthieu Blazy at Bottega Veneta. In terms of gender and racial identity, as the social media chorus quickly pointed out, one of these things was very much like the others. McGirr replies thoughtfully and sensitively when I mention it. “It’s a really important conversation to have,” he says, adding that it’s always been critical to him to have a team that’s “super diverse” – not just in terms of race and gender, but age and nationality as well.
What he doesn’t say is that, in a world of broken meritocracies, it still takes atypical drive and preternatural talent to rise from a humdrum Dublin suburb to the head of a Kering house with a reported annual turnover of roughly 800 million euros. “He’s working-class, you know,” says fellow London designer Charles Jeffrey, who’s known McGirr since he served as his fit model at Saint Martins, their friendship solidified over nights dancing at Vogue Fabrics in Dalston. “There’s not that many of us that have these voices in the industry.”
And then there’s the response to McGirr’s debut, concocted in less than a month and presented in the disused train depot of Les Olympiades on an oddly wintry evening last March. McGirr had been studying Lee’s spring/summer 1995 The Birds collection – particularly its translucent cling-film dress – and experimenting with compression and distortion through sculptural knitwear, sharply angular silhouettes and shoes inspired by horses and goats. While much of the mixed reaction from editors and influencers was coolly measured – none of which impacted the virality of McGirr’s Hoof boots – far too much of the Instagram commentary veered into cyberbullying cloaked in the guise of fashion criticism. In the ’90s, Lee McQueen was known to place gilded skeletons amid the press seats at his shows as a reminder of his disdain for their occasional reproaches; one wonders how he might have responded to a 290-part thread weighing in on his draping skills, as McGirr had to endure. (“Can you imagine,” he asks me at one point, sounding both amused and appalled, “if I had Instagram?”)
On my way to Clerkenwell, I had wondered whether McGirr might have become jaded since I last glimpsed him, back in Paris’s Chinatown in March, being pointedly asked by reporters what he thought Lee would make of his debut collection, but no. McGirr’s pleasure in dressing – whether others or himself – remains intact. If it’s become de rigueur for the millennial directors of major fashion houses to adopt a uniform of the Uniqlo crewneck/Levi’s 501s variety, McGirr still chooses a look every day for the sheer joy of it; say, jeans from Kapital in Tokyo, a vintage tweed blazer from Stefano Pilati’s time at Saint Laurent and diamond pavé earrings from Antwerp’s Diamantkwartier (“The place for a bit of bling,” he says). He gushes, too, about the 2024 Met Gala, when he and Lana Del Rey spent the previous night choreographing their red carpet moves in her suite at the Plaza, ordering M&M-topped sundaes from room service at 2am in a nod to Home Alone. “It’s very stressful, obviously, but I managed to also have fun,” McGirr says. “That’s important.”
Among the McQueen old guard to have rallied around McGirr back on home shores: milliner Philip Treacy. The two bonded at Treacy’s studios, with Treacy reminding McGirr that McQueen spent much of his life being undermined. “Now, obviously, Lee and Isabella are such heroes – and they always were, in their own right – but [Philip] told me that in the ’90s, people didn’t understand them. He was like, ‘People hated Lee,’ ” McGirr says. “[Lee and Isabella] were rebellious – but without being arrogant. That’s important.”
McGirr is in no way arrogant, but he is resolute. As Jeffrey says, he’s always been charming, fun-loving and jolly – but it would be a mistake to confuse his kindness with weakness. There’s a kind of Celtic fire in him, Jeffrey adds, “If people turn around or say no, it’s just like, ‘Well, I’ll f*cking show you.’”
In the years when Alexander McQueen reigned over Cool Britannia, Seán McGirr was coming of age beside the Irish Sea in the Dublin neighbourhood of Bayside – a ’60s suburb with a medieval Kilbarrack graveyard – with his bedroom walls lined with tickets from emo concerts. His mother, Eileen, a fertility nurse, can trace her eldest’s obsession with design back to the hours and hours he spent building amazing structures out of Lego as a three-year-old, while his mechanic father, Brendan, remembers McGirr whiling away rainy Saturdays hanging around his Dublin garage.
McGirr returns to Bayside when he can, where he and his family “stay up until 1 or 2am, pouring our hearts out to each other”, McGirr says, adding that they can quickly disabuse him of any notions of grandeur he may have acquired: “When they saw me on the carpet with Lana at The Met, they were like, ‘Who the f*ck do you think you are?’ I was like, ‘I’m sorry! I just made a dress! I’m no one!’”
“I guess I have this sort of Celtic kinship with McQueen,” he tells me over lunch in the geranium-filled courtyard of La Famiglia, an old-school Italian restaurant off the King’s Road, in August. “We both, weirdly, have tartans,” he adds – although Lee’s, he says, “is way more chic”. On weekends in the ’90s and ’00s, McGirr and his family would travel “deep, deep, deep in the countryside” to the hundred-odd-person village of Lahardane near Ireland’s west coast, where one of Seán’s maternal uncles had a pub. From the age of 10, he collected empties there and heard the punters recount the folklore that McQueen was riffing on.
Despite all of that, McGirr says, “For me, McQueen is about London – there’s an attitude in the city that’s very visceral, but very refined at the same time.” (While his banshees might have their roots in Gaelic folklore, they’re more likely to appear outside Trisha’s, an underground Soho dive, at 5am.) It’s why, even though the job has his “one-hundred-million-and-20-per-cent dedication at all times”, he’s still out and about as much as possible, making frequent excursions across the city by bicycle: to the exhibition of Francis Bacon’s paintings at the National Portrait Gallery; to a gig by the art rock band Still House Plants south of the Thames; and, yes, to the occasional “queer rave in some back-*** place”. (“Sometimes,” he adds, “you need a good stomp.”) We’ve just been to see the glass hammers and wish trees of Tate Modern’s Yoko Ono retrospective – Yoko being, McGirr feels, “very McQueen in her fearlessness”.
Still, he’s under no illusions about the fact that business is everything in fashion now. “It’s not like 10, 15 years ago, when you had certain designers who would show collections that were really cool and really good, but maybe didn’t sell,” he says. “Now everything is based on monetary success. Do I think that’s a shame? Kind of – but it’s important to acknowledge it and understand the times we’re living in.”
The first time McGirr saw the label Alexander McQueen was in the department store Brown Thomas, on the soles of Lee’s 2006 Puma collaboration. It’s also around this time that his paternal grandmother, Maureen, a department store window dresser, gave him a 1950s sewing machine, and that he learnt about someone named Hedi Slimane – quickly deciding to snatch his school uniform to match Slimane’s signature skinny Dior Homme silhouettes.
Today you can feel the legacy of teenage Lee and Hedi fandom in McGirr’s aesthetic, and in his muses – none of whom McQueen pays to wear its clothes, an abnormality in our transactional age. He’s pleased that Beyoncé (among many others) was “really, really obsessed” with the voluminous coats in his first collection and that Charli XCX spent much of her Brat summer in his Hoof boots (“She’s really like the girl, actually, Charli”) – but he’s far more effusive when telling me about Florence Sinclair (photographed for this story), a British Caribbean musician with 10,000 Instagram followers and a sound that reminds him of Lou Reed. (As for whether he plans to continue nurturing McQueen’s affiliation with the royals: “Yeah, they haven’t reached out to me yet,” he jokes, although he thinks “the kids are quite cool” – and that six-year-old Prince Louis, of the three, has the most “McQueen energy”.)
McGirr lives in a two-bedroom ’60s apartment in the emotional nexus of London, where Soho revellers and Piccadilly tourists brush up against the toffs of St James’s Clubland. He still shops at Sainsbury’s, still has his grandmother Maureen as his iPhone background – although he’s delighted to now have the luxury of a spare room for when his family comes to visit, even if said spare room is largely filled with his collection of ’80s Armani suits.
He is, by his own admission, “a bit of a workaholic – that’s just what I like to do”. Most days he’s awake before 7am, reviewing the voice notes he sent to himself the day before over a full pot of slow-drip coffee before lifting weights or practising yoga and heading to the office on foot. There’s a touch of woo-woo to him: he’s into Reiki, cold baths and analysis (Jungian, not Freudian). “I don’t know if everything in the whole world relates back to your relationship with your mother,” he says – though sex, he quickly adds, “is really important”.
I find myself wondering whether any of this has proved a lifeline since last October. We’re in a taxi now, speeding back toward the centre of London, past the gilt statue of the Victoria Memorial and the Regency curve of Piccadilly Circus. I steel myself to ask, as we approach his stop: how, exactly, has he coped with the trolls? His response is measured, but moving. “Obviously I’m a human with a conscience – so if someone says something that’s a bit mean, it might hurt my feelings, but at the same time… it’s noise. You’re always going to have noise.” We say our goodbyes, and he’s swallowed by the ground traffic of Soho. The question – particularly for young designers – seems to be: can you still hear your own voice in spite of that noise?
As we take our seats in Paris at McQueen’s September show, we’re greeted by a statement of intent directly beneath our feet: an installation conceived with Tony-winning designer Tom Scutt that gives the illusion McGirr has drilled clean through the Beaux Arts tiles of the Palais des Études and installed his own steel-plate runway among the debris. “The impetus Seán described for me was about his time in London, walking through Soho at 3am,” explains Scutt, also the mastermind behind the set and costumes for the productions of Cabaret currently running in London and New York. “We talked a lot about that – what it’s like to live in the centre of town and this liminal dream space that opens up between night and day and becomes a portal into another world.” When the two visited the École together, it struck them both: “There’s something quintessentially McQueen about the idea of ripping up the floor of an institution and releasing this sort of spirit,” Scutt says.
More than one showgoer is still gazing downwards at the trompe-l’oeil effect when the lights dim and the pulse of Cyrus Goberville’s soundtrack sounds a warning, before McGirr’s banshees materialise through the vapours that shiver above the metallic catwalk. There, one after another, are the architectural lines of McQueen’s sketches transfigured into distinctive collars; leather charms of the English roses that Burton so loved; the Bumster reimagined with a panel of gossamer silk; georgette dresses adorned with black hawthorn branches in a nod to Lana Del Rey’s Met Gala look – and then, transfixing the room, the iridescent banshee dress. The applause, as the models make their final lap, reverberates around the glass-ceilinged atrium, and when McGirr appears for the customary bow, his eyes are bloodshot.
I’d planned to congratulate him properly backstage in the aftermath, but what awaits us, when we join the models toasting one another among the Corinthian columns, is pandemonium. Daphne Guinness – in a blazer from McGirr’s first McQueen collection scattered with glinting jet stone – picks her way through the TikTokers and ring lights to breathlessly invite McGirr to dissect her collection of Victoriana, just as Lee did in the Noughties. Cardi B, swaddled in furs, insists that “it was beautiful, it was dark, it was edgy” (and also that she will be needing 14 of those dresses with the collars). Then McGirr has Mr Pinault to thank and talking points to rehash about his moodboards for various newspapers.
I’m watching all of this, faintly amused, when I realise McGirr’s mother, dressed in her own clothes, is doing the same thing across the echoing marble room. I find my way to her and ask what, exactly, she makes of this rapture. “Well, McGirr for McQueen,” she says, pausing and smiling in spite of herself.
“You have to admit: it’s got a nice ring to it.”
