Seán McGirr

Seán McGirr is an Irish fashion designer from Dublin and the creative director of Alexander McQueen. He graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA Fashion course in 2014 during the final period of Louise Wilson’s teaching. His graduate menswear used altered denim, drawn surfaces and urban character studies, establishing interests that later reappeared in his work with tailoring and youth culture.

After assistant roles at Burberry and Vogue Hommes Japan, McGirr worked in Uniqlo’s creative offices in Tokyo and Paris on menswear under Christophe Lemaire. He later designed womenswear at Dries Van Noten and joined JW Anderson in 2020, first leading menswear and subsequently taking broader ready-to-wear responsibility.

Kering and Alexander McQueen announced McGirr as creative director on 3 October 2023, and the house dates his creative direction from December that year. His collections have moved from the compressed archive quotations of Autumn/Winter 2024 towards a more deliberate use of McQueen sketches, silhouette systems, British folklore, cinema and contemporary London character.

McGirr works through tailoring under pressure. Jackets and coats begin from elongated or close-cut structures before being wrapped, cinched, rolled or displaced; trousers sit low on the body, while corsetry and curved seams alter the relation between torso and hip. Laminated jersey, transparent inserts and softened drape interrupt the formality of the cut.

At Alexander McQueen, archive material operates as a working prompt. The Birds informed his debut through compression and wrapping, while later collections used original sketches, the S-bend, the bumster, the waterfall collar and early collections such as Banshee. These references are combined with Victorian dandyism, folk ritual, film and urban observation rather than reconstructed as replicas.

Character and setting remain central. McGirr’s work uses casting, music and show architecture to position precise clothes within nightlife, street culture and unstable social roles. The strongest collections balance recognisable house geometry with a looser, more immediate wardrobe.