Seán McGirr trained at Central Saint Martins, completing the MA fashion programme in 2014. He was one of the final students of Louise Wilson before her death that year.

After graduating, he assisted at Burberry and Vogue Hommes Japan. He then took design positions at Uniqlo under Christophe Lemaire in Paris and Tokyo, followed by a stint as womenswear designer at Dries Van Noten in Antwerp. The throughline across those rooms is a flat, utilitarian approach to menswear shapes. Hipster-era trousers and outerwear were pulled into sharper proportion, and knit and shearling were handled as volume.

McGirr joined JW Anderson in 2020 as head of the men’s division, later becoming director of ready-to-wear across both lines. The work there sat inside Jonathan Anderson’s sculptural vocabulary: oversized knits, foreshortened outerwear, denim warped at the waistband, accessories handled as objects.

It placed him alongside the Loewe-era Anderson lineage and a broader London cohort working post-Lemaire on proportion and craft. That position drew Kering’s attention as Sarah Burton’s tenure closed. McGirr was named Burton’s successor at Alexander McQueen in October 2023, taking over after her 13-year run as creative director.

He took the creative director role at Alexander McQueen under Kering as the first outside hire in the house’s history, succeeding Burton, who had been Lee McQueen’s right hand since 1996. His fall-winter 2024 debut opened with a laminated jersey drape dress in a wet-look finish, citing the clingfilm-wrapped opener of Lee McQueen’s spring-summer 1995 Birds collection.

The show then moved through long-haired fur ensembles, leather-hatted cowboy looks, sizeable circular collar knitwear, embellished blazers and cigarette pants, and pinstripes paired with glossy neon shirting. The Sling bag returned with hard metal T-bar buckles drawn from Shaun Leane’s sculptural archive jewelry for the house. House codes were reactivated as hardware and silhouette, framing the chapter as a generational reset of the McQueen language for the Kering portfolio.