The mirrored portal jutting out at an odd angle from a flight of wooden stairs told us we would be time traveling. Sean McGirr had Victorian dandies in mind for his new McQueen collection. “I started with this book I’ve always been obsessed with, Charles Dickens’s Night Walks, about this character who is an insomniac and ends up strolling around London until dawn,” McGirr said. “It kind of got me thinking about this idea of a flaneur, someone who is very self assured and knows themselves really, really well, which for me is a strength of McQueen. You know, it’s always this conviction of character.”
Ads for McGirr’s spring McQueen collection are posted all over Paris: in bus kiosks, on walls—you can’t miss them. Fall was his third runway show at the label and his most confident. In between last season and this one, he’s had a string of red carpet wins, most recently with Miley Cyrus wearing a black embroidered mock neck halter gown of his design to the Oscars last Sunday. In a TikTok making the rounds, when a photographer shouts, “beautiful dress,” Cyrus responds by saying, “Isn’t it? Some would say the best.” That kind of exposure can boost a young designer and a brand.
Rarely do you hear a whoop at a fashion show, but that’s how this one got started. The spontaneous cheer could be heard as the first model walked out of the portal in extreme pointy-toed boots and a peak-shouldered coat, with a lace ruff framing her face. The tailoring here followed that coat’s Victorian Gothic lines: high armholes, long and narrow sleeves, those accentuated shoulders, and a narrow body or a corseted waist.
Suits provided only the show’s prelude and interlude. McGirr’s flaneurs prefer to roam the streets of London in long ruffled silk dresses, their colors pulled from the poster of the 1973 movie version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Philip Treacy-designed chapeaux were a nod to Wilde’s own gentleman’s hat which “he just kind of kinked in a way that maybe suggested something that blurred the lines a little, that maybe was a bit provocative,” McGirr said.
He did his own blurring of the lines, adapting the same gold bullion embroidery for a snug man’s bomber and a sweeping woman’s cape and cutting sporty jackets in his and hers shapes. They were the outliers in a collection that leaned formal. But worth mentioning: the women’s version was basque-shaped, like the McQueen jean jacket that’s been spotted in the front rows this season.
The most spectacular pieces were the short evening jackets that featured different textures of shearling pieced together to form what looked like angel’s wings, which flapped as the models made their way down the Jardin de Plants’s extra-long runway. In Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote, “I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.” Those jackets could take you there.
