“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 enamored 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 realization, 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 disco ball—influences easily apparent on his mood boards. 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.”
