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Back when a young Lee McQueen was showing at London fashion week, there was Dante, the show in a Hawksmoor church with a skeleton in the front row and a blaring soundtrack of organ music and gunfire. And there was Voss, where models were trapped inside a giant mirrored box set up as a psychiatric ward.
Twenty-five years later, the Alexander McQueen brand returned from the Paris schedule to a creepily beautiful subterranean 17th century London chapel, with steel harnesses, bulky ankle strapped heels that looked like electronic monitoring tags, and a chain mail dress of tiny silver skulls.
Darkness is a McQueen happy place. Which is fortunate, because dark times have come for the legendary brand. In the 2000s Lee McQueen was the toast of Paris, growing in sophistication and ambition, until tragedy struck in 2010.
After his death, the talent and emotional intelligence of his successor, Sarah Burton, who designed Kate Middleton’s wedding dress in 2011, kept the name riding high when many thought it would fall apart. But the McQueen name is now losing its heat and the brand is in trouble, undergoing a stark restructuring plan of shuttered stores and job losses.
Bringing McQueen home to the city where the name is still revered was the first decision made by Gianfranco d’Attis, who became the new chief executive in June, and the energy of this show proved it was the right call. McQueen hits different in London.
The new business strategy is to streamline and refocus McQueen: fewer trainers and sweatshirts, more evening gowns (red carpet remains a strength) and British tailoring. For the homecoming, the creative director, Seán McGirr, now in his third year at the brand, went deep into British references. He picked the vaulted undercroft venue because it felt like being inside his favourite painting in the National Gallery, Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. Jackets paid homage to the radical tailoring of Tommy Nutter, Keith Flint hair horns to rave culture. “London is a constant stimulation,” he said backstage. “Style on the street is not conventional. I love the wrongness of it.”
McGirr is 38, with a dimpled smile and a soft Dublin accent. His instincts track lighter and sweeter than this house ever did in its reckless youth. Organza was whipped into meringue-like peaks at the shoulders of a corsetted ivory lace dress - he said he wanted the famous McQueen exaggerated shoulders “to look like angel wings. I wanted the message to feel ethereal, and light in a sense.”
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The Roksanda show, at a rooftop garden next to the National Theatre, was a sunny contrast to McQueen, swathes of cherry- and lavender-coloured silk glinting under a blue sky. Thickly plaited rope belts in contrast colours were a tribute to the monumental fabric sculptures of Francoise Grossen, and a celebration of “the feminine energy of braiding, which is connected to hair, to craft, to housework”, the designer Roksanda Ilincic said.
