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For Alexander McQueen, a return to London Fashion Week was never going to be just a change of scenery. The city is inseparable from the house’s identity: Lee Alexander McQueen trained on Savile Row, studied at Central Saint Martins, and built a career around translating the contradictions of British culture—aristocracy and anarchy, ceremony and subversion—into fashion. For spring/summer 2027, Creative Director Seán McGirr brought the brand back onto the official London Fashion Week schedule for the first time in 25 years, staging the collection beneath the Gothic vaults of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel. It was a homecoming but also something of a reset: McQueen is currently sharpening its focus around the categories most central to its heritage, including tailoring and occasionwear thanks to the recent arrival of CEO Gianfranco D’Attis.
Rather than simply mining the archive, McGirr used those foundations to explore his own experience of London—specifically the dissonance between its formal traditions and its unrulier underground. References to Savile Row sat alongside rave culture; impeccably constructed gowns were interrupted by harnesses, sheer lace, metallic surfaces, and deliberately disheveled beauty. McGirr also brought several threads of McQueen history back into the room, reuniting the house with jeweler Shaun Leane and tailor Huntsman while casting women associated with different eras of the brand.
More than anything, it offered a clearer picture of the McQueen McGirr is trying to build—one that understands the power of the house’s past without treating it as something too precious to disturb.
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A Very British Homecoming
For McQueen, returning to London meant more than staging a show on familiar ground. McGirr used the occasion to reconnect the house with some of the people and institutions that helped shape its visual language in the first place. Jeweler Shaun Leane, whose collaborations with Lee McQueen became some of the most memorable accessories of the designer’s career, returned to work on the collection, while Savile Row tailor Huntsman contributed to several sharply cut looks. Together, those partnerships reinforced the show’s distinctly British sensibility, grounding its more theatrical ideas in the craftsmanship and tradition that have always sat beneath McQueen’s rebellious surface.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Alexander McQueen)
(Image credit: Courtesy of Alexander McQueen)
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
Back to the Craft
This collection also felt like a clearer statement of what McQueen wants to prioritize right now. Rather than leaning heavily on the more casual ready-to-wear that has become an important commercial part of the brand, spring 2027 put tailoring, eveningwear, and occasion dressing firmly back at the center. Sculpted jackets, corseted silhouettes, elaborate gowns, and intricate embellishment all underscored the level of craft McQueen is capable of.
What kept the collection from feeling overly formal, however, was the tension built into those clothes: immaculate construction was offset by exposed skin, sheer lace, harness-like details, and styling that felt deliberately undone. The polish was there, but so was the provocation.
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
(Image credit: Courtesy of Alexander McQueen)
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
McQueen Muses, Then and Now
A return to London naturally invited a look back at the women who have helped define McQueen across generations. The casting brought together current runway fixtures such as Paloma Elsesser with figures who carry a much deeper history with the house, including Karen Elson, whose relationship with McQueen dates back to some of its most iconic early 2000s shows, including the spring/summer 2001 show, Voss.
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
(Image credit: Getty Images)
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
Ravers of the Underground
If the setting suggested ceremony, the clothes often pointed somewhere far less polished. McGirr drew heavily from London’s underground nightlife and rave culture, using it as a counterpoint to the show’s Gothic surroundings and soundtrack by London-based producer (and friend of Charli XCX) A. G. Cook. Metallic fabrics clung closely to the body, sheer lace was layered over undergarments, and silhouettes often felt deliberately stripped back or slightly disheveled. The references never read as costume, though. Instead, they gave the collection a lived-in energy, as if these clothes were intended to move through a long night rather than simply pose beneath stone arches.
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
Horns of Beauty
One of the show’s most memorable ideas arrived through the beauty look. Hair was slicked upward into sharp, metallic horn quaffs, eliciting a strong social media response. Rather than polished and glamorous, the models looked slightly depleted and unruly, with grown-in roots and minimal complexion makeup adding to the sense that they had come straight from a night out. It was theatrical without feeling overly decorative and a fitting extension of McGirr’s interest in London’s darker, nocturnal side.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Alexander McQueen)
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
(Image credit: Launchmetrics/Spotlight)
