“In a brand with the legacy of McQueen, it takes a while to learn the codes. In each collection so far, I’ve done something slightly different in order to understand certain periods of his work. Now, with this one, I want to go to the next level.”

Seán McGirr is in the midst of fittings at the McQueen studio in Clerkenwell, preparing for tomorrow night. That is when he will make his pitch at transcending the sum total of all things McQueen absorbed during his nearly three years at the house.

The convergence we will see in the collection also intersects with a significant geographical shift for McQueen. Tomorrow’s show will be its first on the London Fashion Week schedule since February 2001. That’s not to say McQueen has been entirely absent from its hometown since then – on Sarah Burton’s watch there were some great menswear shows at the sadly defunct London Collections: Men, then two off-schedule spring shows in spring 2022 and 2023.

Up close with some of spring 2027’s embellishments

Photo: Bettina Pittaluga/ Courtesy of McQueen

However, tomorrow’s return means a great deal both to London Fashion Week – which is perennially dedicated to cheerleading the British capital as a key crucible of creativity – as well as to McQueen and McGirr. “It felt like the right moment, and everything aligned,” says the designer, adding: “London is about being free.”

Showing here also presents McGirr with a much more authentic pedestal from which to project his new synthesis of all that acquired McQueen aesthetic lore with his own design identity – because both were forged in London. McGirr first arrived in the city from Ireland aged 17. “I found my people here,” he says, “a bunch of weirdos at Saint Martin’s.” His first home was on a council estate around Haggerston; later, while studying, he spent three years in a derelict former old people’s home in Camden, where he carved out space for a sewing studio. He became an habitué of London’s museums and galleries by day, as well as its clubs and raves by night. At the National Gallery, one work in particular became an obsession: Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. “I would go to the National Gallery and just stare at this painting for ages,” he says.

This collection will reconnect McGirr with some of those formative London influences while also bringing McQueen back into the orbit of some of its first-generation collaborators. One of them is the jeweller and sculptor Shaun Leane, one of Alexander McQueen’s closest creative collaborators, who has contributed to tomorrow’s show.

In McQueen’s Clerkenwell studios

Photo: Bettina Pittaluga/ Courtesy of McQueen

During our preview, McGirr shows me a silver hourglass dress whose jacquard surface is overlaid with drifts of metallic foliage, its alloy leaves dipped in paint to shift between tones. A section of organza adds lightness to the base of a look that is almost armour-ish in its fierceness above. “It’s a really quintessential McQueen silhouette,” he says, placing its Hitchcock proportions in the house’s late-2000s period, then adds: “I love this idea of embroidery on top of things that are already decorative. Everything really needs to have energy. I don’t want anything to feel too solid or static.”

To be static would be antithetical to the spirit of McQueen, whose founder observed in 2010: “You can’t keep rehashing the same concepts of the good, the bad, and the ugly.” McGirr’s instinct is aligned. “You can’t go back. You have to move forward,” he says. “He was the first one to chop everything up and move forward. You have to have the same thinking.” Embracing the freedom and fearlessness that thinking demands is the key to transmitting the essence of McQueen forward: tomorrow night, back in London, Seán McGirr will put that into practice.