GO GOTHIC: McQueen’s creative director Seán McGirr is stripping it back for the brand’s fall 2025 campaign starring Alex Consani, Athiec Geng, Chu Wong and Libby Taverner.
The new campaign is simple with its gray backdrop as it nods to Victorian Gothic with the models in black or white lace, extra pointy boots and hair blowing in the wind as if they were battling an English blizzard in some sort of Brontë novel.
Without the setting of a London pub, an eerie street or a Welsh castle in the brand’s latest campaign, the models made do with imagination as they channeled 19th century figures such as Oscar Wilde, the English performer Vesta Tilley and American painter Romaine Brooks.
McQueen fall 2025 campaign
Courtesy
“I wanted to capture the tension between freedom and rigour, because it feels like a very real tension. So, I drew on the lives of underground iconoclasts, like Oscar Wilde and Vesta Tilley, whose radical self-expression was an extension of their art, to give space to something more expressive,” McGirr told WWD.
“That’s inherent in the pieces we shot, which embody very McQueen juxtapositions of freedom and form, with sharpened tailoring against beautifully light silk georgette,” he added.
McQueen fall 2025 campaign
Courtesy
The designer teamed up with stylist Sarah Richardson once again on the campaign. She also styles his runways shows. The pair have built quite a close relationship that has meant McQueen’s visual language remains consistent with poetic motifs.
McGirr explained that the fall 2025 collection was “rooted in the uncompromising self-expression of independent thinkers, exploring the tension between tradition and transgression. Their spirit of progressivism feels pertinent now, inherent in modern questions of character, identity, idealism and gender.”
