McGirr’s job, of course, is to bring newness to Alexander McQueen. When the posting was announced, Gianfilippo Testa, the label’s CEO, said: “He will bring a powerful creative language to [the brand].” To do so, he’ll inject his millennial point of view. “For me, it has to have a youthful energy. I think it should be about London, this mix of youth culture that I see all the time here. I want that to be represented.” Also, “It has to provoke a reaction; that’s the DNA of the brand. McQueen is also about aggression, but playful aggression.”
Will there be bumsters? The hip-slung, ass crack-revealing pants McQueen was notorious for have been turning up on other runways this season. But McGirr isn’t doing anything that literal. Instead, he says he graded up a pair from the archives 10 times. “For me, this is a modern version. They’re still super, super low, but they’re loose, and you wear them in a cool way.” The new McQueen, he says, “shouldn’t feel too hard to live in”.
Growing the ready-to-wear is a crucial part of the gig; McGirr says a big part of the current business is one sneaker. There’s a lot of opportunity in that, especially for someone as confident as McGirr. “I’ve always had a lot of conviction in what I’ve done,” he says. “I moved to London when I was 17, a week after school, and my parents were really supportive because I had conviction.”
Now 35, McGirr was one of those alternative London kids he’s talking about when McQueen died by suicide in 2010 — an Irish import on the verge of applying to Central Saint Martins to pursue a job in fashion. Horn of Plenty and Plato’s Atlantis, McQueen’s final two shows, had made an impression. “I was 20… it was my formative year, and those two shows instilled a lot of inspiration. Plato’s Atlantis was just very bold, with such a strong message. That show had an effect on me, and it had a really strong effect on culture, with Lady Gaga and ‘Bad Romance’. It really was in the fabric.”
He grew up in a “pretty banal, quite conventional” suburb of Dublin with parents who worked hard; his mum as a nurse and his dad as a mechanic (both of his parents, as well as his younger brother and sister, will be at the show). “I wasn’t really around fashion; what introduced me to it were films,” he says. His dad was into Tarantino and showed him Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. “These characters who were on the fringes, the outsiders, slightly dangerous — I thought they were really cool.” Before that, McGirr had wanted to be a journalist, but movies helped him realise that you could say what you want to say through clothes. “That’s why I love McQueen so much because there’s always a message in the clothes,” he says. It was his grandmother, a window dresser in the ’50s and ’60s, who introduced him to sewing. He started buying vintage clothes and reworking them and tailored his school uniform. “This idea of improvisation — I wanted to say something by how something fits. That was something that really appealed to me.”
