This story originally appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue. Order yours now.
written by SIMRAN HANS
photography SARAH STEDEFORD
styling CAMILLE BIDAULT-WADDINGTON
At 36 years old, Seán McGirr is one of the youngest creative directors of any major fashion brand. Unlike the rest of his age demo, the Irish designer and creative director of Alexander McQueen is highly offline. “He’ll do the opposite of what people want or expect,” in fact, says Jojo Orme, aka post-punk musician Heartworms—part of McGirr’s cadre of artists and friends. That feels in the spirit of McQueen, one of the world’s most iconoclastic, provocative, and revered fashion brands.
Fans of the British house, founded in 1992, are fiercely protective of late founder Lee Alexander McQueen’s legacy. They’re tentative about those who have inherited it, keenly making their feelings known in the comment section. Sitting in the top-floor office of McQueen’s Clerkenwell HQ, the resolutely sunny McGirr does not feel this pressure.
It’s golden hour, light pouring in. The room’s clean geometric lines and dramatic skyline views look a little different from his usual workspace, which is with the ready-to-wear designers next door. He describes his office as “creative chaos,” an explosion of fabrics and works-in-process, images plastered on the wall. McGirr is dressed in a sharp-shouldered blazer and textured crocodile-patterned boots, an aggressive polished silver zip running down their front. “With clothes, it’s about how you show up in the world,” he says, but the toughness of his look is offset by his alert blue eyes, soft-spoken voice, and cheeringly boyish, dimpled grin.
A sense of toughness is laced throughout the history of the house. A hard-edged iconoclast and rigorous craftsman, Lee McQueen’s mix of fury and genius appealed to rebellious women (and their intelligence). After his death in 2010, his successor and long-term collaborator, Sarah Burton, lent that same fierce character a different, graceful softness until she stepped down as creative director in 2023. Dublin-born McGirr took over as a relative unknown in December that same year, having previously worked under Jonathan Anderson, Dries Van Noten, and Christophe Lemaire. Since moving to London in the late 2000s, he has found himself surrounded by big personalities, people “who are artists in their own right, or poets, or whatever.” McGirr may not be the loudest voice in the room, but he’s always gravitated to the heart of the action, and it is these strident, expressive characters who inform his vision for the house.
In his inner circle are makers like the Paris-based painter Alex Foxton, his boyfriend of more than seven years, and Thomas Petherick, a set designer and sculptor McGirr has been friends with since McGirr was 18. There is also Beatrix Blaise, a filmmaker and old friend whom he describes as “a real intellectual, punk in her own way,” who dresses in vintage men’s tailoring and once worked in the same Shoreditch pub as Petherick. McGirr was a student then, working part-time in the luxury department store Selfridges.
Today his universe includes the rapper John Glacier, who wears McQueen’s pin-striped suits like armour, and Rene Matić, an artist and poet who says both they and McGirr engage with the past “not as a static archive, but as a living, breathing force.” McGirr is also drawn to goths, like Orme, singer-songwriter Lauren Auder, and beauty editor Tish Weinstock, who says she feels “like a dark elven sorceress” when she wears McQueen. What McGirr’s muses have in common is their frankness. “Sometimes I want sharp edges and a fuck-off attitude,” says Orme. “McQueen is a power symbol to me.”
McGirr is interested in narrative and is emphatic about bringing that to the McQueen world. “I really, in my bones, identify so much with my Irishness,” he says. Irish people are master storytellers, he explains. (“His dark sense of humour and ability to tell stories” are his superpowers, Tish Weinstock says.) “We can’t stop. We just talk, talk, talk, especially in my family.”
On weekends, McGirr would travel to Lahardane, a tiny town in the west of Ireland where his mother’s family owned a pub. He is from a big, close-knit family, with over 30 cousins on his mother’s side. (One is the filmmaker Colm Bairéad, who directed The Quiet Girl, an adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novella Foster, in 2022.) “They wouldn’t be home watching TV, they would go to the pub every evening and just chat.” He’d listen, rapt, as the older generation shared mystic tales about banshees and ghosts. Sometimes, he believed them. “But it wouldn’t scare you,” he emphasises. “It’s just a story that triggers your imagination.”
The stories McGirr binged as a teenager were mainly Hitchcock thrillers and action films. He’d watch them with his dad, drawn to the dominant women on screen. “Tippi Hedren in The Birds, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Sigourney Weaver in Aliens . . . they’re all quite forthright,” he says. “The interesting thing about Aliens is that all the male characters are actually quite weak—they’re real wimps.” It’s Ripley, Weaver’s character, who is the protagonist. “As a gay kid, you’re like, ‘That’s cool.’” He notes their costumes: Hedren’s wool suit, Thurman’s shrunken leather jacket, Weaver’s butch tank top worn with cargo pants.
“Each of those women have a uniform,” he says. He started to associate clothes with characters.
Around this time, McGirr’s own personality was forming. In Dublin, “fashion wasn’t really there, so I didn’t know much about it,” he says. Then he started going to gigs. Watching bands like Klaxons and The Libertines, he caught a glimpse of both style and community, imported from a London scene. It was the era of indie sleaze: military jackets, floppy fringes, and coloured neon tights. “It was like, a lot of boys who wore women’s Topshop jeans, and girls in 1950s vintage styles,” he remembers. “I was obsessed with Hedi Slimane’s
Dior Homme and Pete Doherty.” McGirr’s aunt gifted him a clunky 1950s sewing machine, and taught him how to use it. He started buying vintage clothes from charity shops, tailoring his school uniform to be slimmer and more precise. Like a lot of Millennial teenagers, McGirr started watching runway shows on YouTube, where he discovered the work of Lee McQueen.
McGirr craved “a creative freedom—deep expression,” the kind he sometimes struggled to articulate at home. He moved to London at 18, to study menswear at the London College of Fashion, and later won a scholarship to do an MA in fashion at Central Saint Martins. “London allows you to be who you are, especially when you’re a bit shy and you grow up in a school that’s a little bit more conservative.” When asked what his ambition was back then, he seems tickled by the question. “I’m not really a ‘five-year plan’ person,” he says. When he landed in London, he lived in a Camden council flat with mould on its ceiling next to the nightclub Koko. “I had no money,” he says. “There was nothing to lose.”
It was also the last gasp before Instagram, a time when being social was currency (as opposed to being on social media). Step into the right Shoreditch pub and you could be at the centre of culture. People went to parties with their friends instead of brand-sponsored dinners. McGirr consi-ders London his home, though. “I’m always an outsider in London,” he says. It’s this outsider perspective that has made him “an astute observer,” even from the thick of the crowd.
McGirr has spent time studying Lee McQueen’s values of “assertiveness” and strength. “There’s a forthrightness and an irreverence” to the McQueen woman at the centre of his collections, not unlike McGirr’s own female friends. “Seán has been able to mine his own references and meet the spirit of McQueen on his own terms,” says Weinstock.
As we watch the sun go down over St Paul’s, he recounts visiting the McQueen archive in north London. He’s spent many afternoons leafing through the racks of incomplete garments, half-made toiles, and shoes missing one half of their pair. “They’re unfinished stories for me. I go in and I think, ‘How can we retell this story in a different way?’” he says, gazing away thoughtfully, before looking back, excited—a dimple appearing as his face breaks into a grin.
BEATRIX BLAISE, FILMMAKER
What Seán and I have in common is . . . we love characters that exist outside.
Gus Van Sant’s movies have always been a place where our minds and hearts meet—My Own Private Idaho and Paranoid Park. There’s a kind of youthful angst and purity that we both find interesting—poetic and queer.
LAUREN AUDER, MUSICIAN
What Seán and I have in common is . . . we both dig from the gothic and mysterious, from pre-Christian folklore to modern myths of the 1980s and ’90s.
THOMAS PETHERICK, SET DESIGNER & SCULPTOR
Seán’s vision for McQueen is . . . Nicole Kidman arriving to the rave in Babygirl.
TISH WEINSTOCK, EDITOR
Seán’s vision for McQueen is . . . dark and romantic, but there’s also an underlying subversive sense of humour. He’s also got a raw instinct for youth culture, but at the same time the refinement needed for a luxury house.
ALEX FOXTON, ARTIST
Seán’s vision for McQueen is . . .the terrifying woman at a party that you’re afraid to talk to, but who ends up being your new best friend.
TOM SCUTT, ARTIST
What Seán and I have in common is . . . we both gravitated towards London. The city has invited us to be who we dreamt of being.
HEARTWORMS, MUSICIAN
I want to be part of the McQueen universe because . . . Seán’s vision electrifies the mundane with no rule book. It’s similar to how I see the world.
RENE MATIĆ, ARTIST & POET
I want to be part of the McQueen universe because . . . both of us engage with the past not as a static archive, but as a living, breathing force that shapes our expression.
hair TOM WRIGHT AT STREETERS Tom Wright at Streeters
makeup CRYSTABEL EFEMENA RILEY USING MANASI 7 AT JULIAN WATSON AGENCY
set design LEE FLUDE AT AGENCY 41
creative movement director STEPHEN GALLOWAY AT PARKAELI
photographic assistants HEATHER LAWRENCE, KARINA BARBERIS, MORGAN E. RUSSELL
styling assistant LEA SANCHEZ & ELIZABETE PAKULE
hair assistants LAURA SWAINE, LEE DEVLIN, SARAH SANGO, MATTHEW THARP
makeup assistants TINA KHATRI & FERNANDA PAZ
production THE MORRISON GROUP
production manager MORGAN SHEPHERD
production assistant MILES JONES