Alexander McQueen returns to London Fashion Week

Alexander McQueen is coming home.

The British house, founded in London in 1993 and absent from the city’s official fashion week schedule for the better part of 25 years, has confirmed it will show its spring/summer 2027 collection at London Fashion Week, under creative director Seán McGirr.

The return is significant by any measure. McQueen decamped to Paris in 2001 following investment from the Gucci Group, and has remained on the Paris calendar ever since, through the tenures of both Sarah Burton and McGirr, who was appointed in late 2023. London has seen occasional one-off events, but nothing on the official LFW schedule. That changes this season, with the show set to take place in Holborn.

The house’s connection to London is not merely sentimental. McQueen was born in Lewisham, trained on Savile Row and graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1992, and it was in London that he staged the shows that made his reputation: early, ferocious collections in raw, unexpected spaces that operated less like fashion presentations than theatrical events. The Gatliff Road warehouse era from the late 1990s, in particular, produced images that remain among the most reproduced and discussed in fashion history. A spinning platform, a pair of robots, a white dress. A model holding her composure as paint hit her from every direction. These things happened in London, and the city’s creative identity absorbed them.

McGirr, himself a Central Saint Martins graduate, has spoken about the energy of London as something that runs through the house’s DNA regardless of where it shows. The return to the official schedule formalises what has arguably always been true: that wherever McQueen goes, its reference points lead back to this city.

The timing is not without anticipation. A new chief executive arrived in June with a brief to sharpen the business. In that context, a homecoming show carries strategic as well as symbolic weight. A strong London moment, outside the noise of the Paris calendar, is an opportunity to reset the conversation around the house.

McGirr’s tenure has had its uneven patches, but the most recent collections have shown a surer hand, and the autumn/winter 2026 show in Paris drew a strong response. The LFW spring/summer 2027 show will be closely watched, not least by an international press corps for whom McQueen’s return gives this season’s London schedule an added dimension it has sometimes lacked in recent years.

British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir has described the return as a meaningful moment for London as a whole, and it’s hard to argue with that. Whatever the pressures surrounding the house right now, the fact of McQueen back on a London runway, in September, carries a charge that goes well beyond the fashion calendar.