Three days after Sarah Burton showed her final Alexander McQueen collection at Paris Vogue Week, the model’s father or mother firm named Seán McGirr, an Irish designer, as her successor.
“Alexander McQueen is a home we’re obsessed with, and we’re assured that Seán McGirr will have the ability to pursue its journey with a brand new artistic impetus,” François-Henri Pinault, the chief govt of Kering, mentioned in a press release launched on Tuesday.
Mr. McGirr most just lately was head of ready-to-wear on the British label JW Anderson. He has additionally labored at Dries Van Noten, Burberry and Uniqlo. He’s a graduate of Central Saint Martins in London, the place Ms. Burton graduated from earlier than beginning her 26-year career at Alexander McQueen as an intern in 1996.
Within the assertion, Gianfilippo Testa, the chief govt of Alexander McQueen, cited Mr. McGirr’s “expertise, character and creativity” as causes for hiring him. The assertion didn’t specify when Mr. McGirr would begin.
By appointing Mr. McGirr as artistic director at Alexander McQueen, Mr. Pinault has continued a development he helped begin amongst fashion-industry executives to favor comparatively unknown designers over splashier names for prime positions at huge homes. Earlier this yr, Mr. Pinault employed Sabato de Sarno, a former director of males’s and girls’s ready-to-wear at Valentino, to take over at Gucci. In 2021, Mr. Pinault promoted Matthieu Blazy to go of Bottega Veneta, the place he had been a design director.
On social media, preliminary reactions to the announcement of Mr. McGirr’s appointment had been blended. Some famous that it came about simply days after Ms. Burton took an emotional bow at her ultimate runway present, which she had devoted to the model’s founder, Lee Alexander McQueen, who died by suicide at 40 in 2010. On the present, notes left on each seat mentioned Mr. McQueen’s “want was all the time to empower girls.”
1 Granary, an internet publication began by college students at Central Saint Martins, wrote in a post on X, previously often called Twitter, that with Mr. McGirr’s appointment, the artistic administrators at Kering’s six vogue manufacturers at the moment are white males.
