Alexander McQueen returned to London Fashion Week this month for the first time in twenty-five years, and it staged the occasion in the vaulted undercroft of a chapel in Holborn rather than anywhere designed to be seen from a distance. The house had shown in Paris since 2001; its creative director since 2023, the Dublin-born, Central Saint Martins–trained Seán McGirr, chose instead a crypt-like room low enough to keep the whole audience close to the clothes.

The collection ran two references against each other without resolving them: Piero della Francesca's altarpiece The Baptism of Christ, which McGirr has said he returns to at the National Gallery, and the outdoor rave — sharp tailoring with structured shoulders and narrow waists set beside tie-dye mini dresses and leather harnesses lit up with neon. "This collection is a celebration of London's ceaselessly stimulating and transcendent power," McGirr said of the pairing, and the finale made the argument in one garment: a black strapless gown, leather bodice, sheer skirt, dramatic feathers gathered at the hips — sacred silhouette, nightclub materials.

McQueen himself trained on Savile Row before founding the house in 1992, and the label's early notoriety — the "bumster" trouser, the collection titled Highland Rape — came from treating London's rougher instincts as material worth tailoring rather than smoothing over. A quarter century in Paris didn't erase that instinct; it just moved the room. This time the room was a crypt under Holborn — low stone ceiling, no clean sightline, and the front row close enough to count the feathers on the last dress.