McQueen Is Home Now: London Tailoring Shapes the House’s Next Chapter

For McQueen, coming home was the journey of 2026. Being home is the chapter that begins now, and the house is writing it in cloth, in the boardroom and on the streets of the city that shaped it.

The Undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel is a low, rib-vaulted room from the seventeenth century, with graves still lying beneath its stone floor. On 20 September 2026, McQueen filled it with a soundtrack by the London producer A.G. Cook and showed a collection that Seán McGirr had built from two pictures of his city. One was the pale angel in Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, which hangs in the National Gallery. The other was a group of ravers walking home at dawn. It was the house’s first show on the official London Fashion Week schedule since 2001, the year McQueen took its main line to Paris.

The Huntsman Jackets: McQueen Tailoring Returns to Savile Row

Tailoring carried the collection, and its clearest pieces came from Huntsman, the Savile Row house that cut three of the men’s looks in heritage British wools. Huntsman once made suits for Lee Alexander McQueen himself, and the two houses had worked together twice before, in 2002 and 2012. McGirr began reading through Huntsman’s records of the founder’s orders about a year and a half before the show. On the runway, the long Huntsman line arrived with rounded shoulders that recalled the angel’s folded wings.

The jeweller and sculptor Shaun Leane returned as well. His pieces for Lee McQueen in the 1990s are among the most recognisable objects in the house’s history, and the cast brought back women associated with different eras of the brand.

These relationships came back into the room:

• Huntsman cut three bespoke men’s looks, its third project with McQueen.
• Shaun Leane, a collaborator of the founder since the 1990s, worked on the collection.
• Women from several McQueen eras walked in the show.

All three belong to the London of tailors, jewellers, art schools and clubs from which Lee McQueen built his house in 1992, and the decisions that brought McQueen back to that London began months before the show.

From Reset to Runway: The McQueen Timeline Since Spring 2026

McQueen’s way back to London took about six months, from Kering’s reset in spring to the show in the Undercroft, and each step built on the one before.

In the coming weeks, D’Attis presents his three-year strategy for the house to Kering.

The timeline also shows where the decisions behind the show were made, and the strategy that grows out of them now has a clear centre.

Fewer Doors, Clearer Lines: McQueen’s Strategy Under Gianfranco D’Attis

McQueen’s strategy now centres on tailoring and occasionwear, the two categories chief executive Gianfranco D’Attis describes as the cornerstones of the house. He has said McQueen intends to stay in London, and his stated ambition is for the house “to be a leader in tailoring”.

His brief follows Luca de Meo’s diagnosis of a house that had grown into the footprint of a much larger brand, with a retail network of around 135 stores and sneakers carrying a large share of sales. The new course already shows in several decisions:

• Tailoring and occasionwear lead the offer, supported by a growing ready-to-wear line.
• Shoes, long the commercial engine, are being brought into proportion with the rest of the business.
• The London flagship moves from 27 Old Bond Street to a smaller space on the same street this autumn.
• The organisation draws more closely on Kering’s group structures.

Lee McQueen learned to cut on Savile Row before he studied at Central Saint Martins, and D’Attis points to that training when he speaks of the credibility the house holds in tailoring. On the creative side, McGirr has been working towards the same ground from a different direction.

Angels and Ravers: Seán McGirr Turns London’s Contradictions Into a Design Language

Seán McGirr defines McQueen’s Britishness through the collisions of London, and he built Spring/Summer 2027 around them. Impeccably constructed gowns met harnesses, sheer lace and metallic surfaces, and the beauty looks borrowed from the city’s subcultures. McGirr named the tailor Tommy Nutter, whom he calls the first rebel of Savile Row, as a bridge between the establishment and its outsiders. In his own words, the house carries the city’s “uncompromising attitude and subversive spirit”.

McGirr joined McQueen in 2023 and has spoken openly about spending his first seasons learning the different periods of the house. London, in his telling, is the point at which that study becomes a language of his own, with the sacred and the profane, discipline and the rave, the institution and the outsider all sharing one room.

Tate Britain and the Rail: Where McQueen’s New Course Is Tested Next

McQueen’s new course meets its next test in two places: at Tate Britain, where The 90s: Art and Fashion opens on 8 October with McQueen’s support, and in stores, when the tailoring from the Undercroft reaches clients in 2027. D’Attis sees the exhibition as a way to strengthen the house’s ties to British art and making.

Reviews of the show divided along familiar lines. Some critics found it leaned on established McQueen references, while British Vogue has since noted a “McQueen effect” in other collections, from cropped jackets to low, narrow trousers.

This autumn, London shows McQueen’s 1990s on the walls at Millbank while the house prepares to sell its 2027 tailoring on Old Bond Street. Both addresses belong to the same city, and McQueen lives there again.