Seán McGirr gets gritty in the city for his first McQueen campaign

McQueen has just dropped its first ever campaign under newly appointed creative director Seán McGirr. Shot by renowned British photographer Glen Luchford, the new stills feature February’s AW24 collection on a host of moody models dotted around London’s east end. “McQueen is a London-born brand and has always represented an idea of London that I’m deeply attached to,” said McGirr in a statement released with the images. “It has a very visceral kind of energy, driven by the eclectic cast of characters you see here.”

For Luchford and McGirr, that cast of characters includes a model in a smashed glass dress riding horseback through the night, a couple more embracing in what looks like the living room of your grandma’s flat, and others standing in red-brick alleys, or in sparsely furnished rooms. A number of recognisable pieces from McGirr’s first collection also appear in the campaign, including the cloven horse boots, a broken glass top that Troye Sivan recently wore on tour, and the vacuum packed jersey dress that opened the show.

Elsewhere in the statement, McGirr said that he wanted to “bring that [eclectic] energy to life with the rigour and raw feeling that makes the city’s air hum, leaning deep into its tensions – something that feels poetic and primal; powerful and real.” Well, London is quite tense and primal, so he’s definitely got that one right!

The grey cityscape we see in the new campaign is a far cry from the first images we saw of McGirr’s new McQueen, in which the designer captured a more naturalistic vibe. In those shots, muses Debra Shaw and Frankie Rayder were captured in the woods wearing silver skull masks, in stark contrast to the suburban settings we see today.

Despite this, it does seem that McGirr is carrying through the attitude of his AW24 show into this new campaign. Back then, show notes for the collection introduced “a rough opulence” that was about “revealing the animal within,” and McGirr seems to have stuck with that gritty theme for now.

Click through the gallery above for the full campaign.