Seán McGirr taps into 90s-era spikiness in Alexander McQueen debut show

New creative director says he wants to take fashion house in direction of ‘rough glamour’ and ‘anti-politeness’

Only at Alexander McQueen could a subterranean raw-concrete venue, as chosen by Seán McGirr for his debut show, feel like a respectful homage to the heritage of a fashion house. McQueen stands for savagery and for sentimentality, and old-timers love to reminisce about nights spent shivering in derelict car parks being outraged by the designer’s bumsters in the 1990s. In the event, a day of driving rain had left McGirr’s disused Chinatown food market bleaker than he perhaps intended, chilled to its raw bones and perilous with puddles. Which might have been a coincidence, or might – a certain witchiness being a strand of the McQueen DNA – have been the spirit of Lee McQueen dialling in from the afterlife with his distinctive dark sense of humour.

The models scowled, arms wrapped tight around their bodies, hurrying along the catwalk as if they were navigating a particularly sketchy street on the late-night walk home from a club. The first wore a dress in laminated black jersey, glossy and salty-sweet as liquorice, wrapped clingfilm-tight. It was a nod to a dress made of pallet tape from Lee McQueen’s collection The Birds, shown in a warehouse in London’s then-gritty King’s Cross in 1995. It was also a great dress. The McQueen language was strong in the silhouette. Shoulders were padded until the models hunched in statuesque coats; trousers were shrunken and bum-hugging.