McQueen Returns to London Fashion Week With a Savile Row-Meets-Rave Collection

2 min read

London is a city of extremes. Of pomp and circumstance, yes, but of subversion and counterculture. For McQueen’s spring/summer 2027 collection, the brand’s first official show on the London Fashion Week calendar since 2001, designer Seán McGirr drew on both sides of the city, from pristine tailoring to undone club dressing.

Presented inside the Undercroft at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel—a cavernous, 15th-century structure with a stone floor and visible gravestones—in front of guests including Lola Tung, Emma Corrin, Alexa Chung, and Florence Welch, the collection tapped into the restless energy of the city around it. “London always stimulates me,” McGirr said following the show. “There’s an attitude, there’s a playfulness. People mix things in a ‘wrong’ way. I love the wrongness.”

That tension played out in evening wear imagined for a South London rave, not a gala. A white dress in high-sheen silk was cut away with a sharp, body-baring detail, while the corseted look on Paloma Elsesser had a sheer skirt asking to be danced in.

Details hint at both the city itself and the brand’s rebellious heritage. Models had their hair gelled into mohawk-style horns and pumps came with scalloped heels that recalled the brand’s mid-aughts “Armor” bag. They were shoes, McGirr pointed out, that belonged at Cyberdog, the cult music and cyber retail store in Camden’s Stables Market.

The tailoring was just as theatrical: structured, severe suits stretched into angel-winged tails, turning suiting into something almost otherworldly. Three of the suits were designed with Huntsman, a Savile Row tailor that collaborated with the brand in 2002 and 2012. A quieter influence came from Piero della Francesca’s “The Baptism of Christ,” a painting McGirr discovered at the National Gallery after moving to London, which represents “transcendence and serenity,” he said.

McGirr has one of the harder jobs in fashion. He is designing for a house whose founder was not only hugely talented but also hugely loved, and whose work has been endlessly praised and mythologized. This collection suggested McGirr is beginning to find a way forward—through the house’s codes, rather than simply back through its history.

Matthew Velasco is the Fashion News Editor at ELLE. Based in New York City, he previously worked as a News Writer at W magazine and an Assistant Editor at V magazine. Outside of fashion, he enjoys interior design, tennis (both watching and playing), and a jam-packed antique store.