Alexander McQueen Is Returning To London Fashion Week

Alexander McQueen will return to London Fashion Week for spring/summer 2027, the brand announced today, returning to its roots for the first time under creative director Seán McGirr, who was appointed in 2024.

“London has always been at the heart of McQueen; there’s a uniquely visceral energy to the city that runs throughout the house’s history and continues to inspire everything we do today,” McGirr says. “Returning to London Fashion Week allows us to deeply engage with that spirit and the creative community that defines both London and this house.”

McQueen hasn’t shown in London since Sarah Burton’s spring/summer 2023 Show, First Sight at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. The brand also showed in London the year prior, for spring/summer 2022, on an East London rooftop, inside a bubble dome.

Of course, the British fashion capital is central to the brand history. Launched by Lee Alexander McQueen in 1993, London played host to some of the designer’s most revered shows, including his early collections Highland Rape (autumn/winter 1995) The Birds (spring/summer 1995) and Golden Shower (spring/summer 1998). His Gatliff Road Warehouse era from 1998 to 2001 (No. 13, Eshu, Voss, What a Merry-Go-Round) is often considered McQueen’s most influential London period. McQueen then moved his shows to Paris in 2001, following investment from Gucci Group.

“Bringing McQueen back to London Fashion Week is a meaningful moment for the house. London is where our story began and remains central to our identity,” McQueen CEO Gianfranco D’Attis, who was appointed to the role on 3 June, said in a statement. “We are proud to reaffirm our commitment to the British Fashion Council and to the city’s extraordinary creative ecosystem, while continuing to build on McQueen’s heritage and shape its future.”

The brand’s return is a major coup for London Fashion Week, which has seen many of its most influential British houses decamp to Paris – including McQueen, Stella McCartney and Victoria Beckham – leaving a schedule anchored by Burberry, Erdem and Simone Rocha, alongside scores of smaller emerging brands.

“One of my earliest ambitions as CEO of the British Fashion Council has been to see Alexander McQueen return home to London Fashion Week,” says British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir. “Few have shaped the global fashion landscape with the same force, imagination and cultural impact, and now is the time to welcome the brand back to its London roots. McQueen’s return is a statement of confidence in British creativity at its most fearless and distinctive. We are proud to welcome the house back to the official schedule and look forward to building an ambitious and meaningful partnership across the seasons ahead.”

The Kering-owned brand is undergoing a restructuring led by group CEO Luca de Meo, including job cuts and the appointment of D’Attis. The details of the upcoming show remain under wraps, but an impactful London show would be a key moment for McGirr to make a splash, outside of the saturated Paris schedule.

Kate Moss Just Set A Fashion-World Record Thanks To Madonna

Kate Moss was the only supermodel not asked to feature in the most supermodel-heavy music video of all time. Discovered by Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm Model Management, in a queue at JFK Airport just two years earlier, Moss was still on the cusp of global fame when, in 1990, a camera-weary George Michael decided that, rather than appear in the video for “Freedom! ’90” himself, he would hand the spotlight to Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford, inspired by Peter Lindbergh’s now-iconic portrait of the five women on the January 1990 cover of British Vogue. “I just missed it,” Moss told The Telegraph in 2011, when asked about her biggest regrets. “That would have been amazing.”

Oh well. In 2012, Michael finally turned to Moss – who had arguably eclipsed her peers in notoriety – to front the video for his comeback single “White Light”, in which she plays his mother. “Every boy who has lost his mum thinks his mum was the most beautiful woman in the world,” Michael told Magic FM at the time. “Why not ask the most beautiful woman in the world to be that figure?” By then, Moss had become as much a muse to music as she was to fashion, having bridged the two worlds through a series of indie boyfriends and a rock-and-roll reputation to rival theirs. (See: Moss, leaning backwards out of Pete Doherty’s window with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, or tramping through Worthy Farm in a metallic mini dress and mud-splattered Hunters at the 2005 edition of Glastonbury Festival.)

There she was as an exquisite corpse in Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone”; a thuggish femme fatale in Primal Scream’s “Kowalski” in 1997; later singing backing vocals on the band’s cover of “Some Velvet Morning” in 2002, the same year she appeared as one of several Moss clones in Marianne Faithfull’s “Sex With Strangers”; and, most famously, in The White Stripes’ 2003 video for “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”, pole-dancing for Sofia Coppola. Then along came appearances in Paul McCartney’s 2013 “Queenie Eye”, the posthumous video for Elvis Presley’s “The Wonder of You” and Massive Attack’s “Ritual Spirit”, both released in 2016. And so it should perhaps come as no surprise that, when Torso – the New York-based duo affiliated with pioneering fashion-cum-art collective DIS, and known for their work for likes of Mugler, Nike andl latterly, Charli xcx – was casting for Madonna’s just-released short film, which previews her forthcoming Confessions II album, Moss turned up once again.

During the “Danceteria” sequence – an ode to the New York club that shaped Madonna’s early career – she appears in the reflection of a bathroom mirror, flipping her hair in a biker jacket, while Benedict Cumberbatch, Odessa A’zion, Archie Madekwe, Gwendoline Christie, Arca, Shygirl, Richard E Grant, Honey Dijon, João Pedro and, bizzarely, Cole Palmer, writhe around the sinks, all of them clad in slinky, club-ready Dolce & Gabbana looks. That Sabrina Carpenter and Julia Garner also feature is a reminder of both the 67-year-old musician and the 52-year-old model’s influence.

It also places Moss at the centre of a peculiar piece of pop-cultural trivia. With this latest cameo, she is now tied with Cara Delevingne for the greatest number of music-video appearances by a model, at 14. Delevingne’s tally includes appearances in Taylor Swift’s 2015 “Bad Blood”, Elton John’s 2024 “Step Into Christmas” and – stretching the definition somewhat – the Gal Gadot-organised crime that was the celebrity singalong version of “Imagine” in 2020. The statistic calls to mind one of Moss’s most famous quotes, listed – perhaps apocryphally – on IMDb as: “I would have wanted to be a rock star, a lead singer, if I wasn’t a model. I’d go touring in a bus with my band. In my next life, that’s the plan.” As it turned out, Moss hardly needed to wait for a divine act of reincarnation in order to make any of that happen.