Why is London Fashion Week betting on Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane for SS27?
For SS27, Alexander McQueen returns to London and Christopher Kane makes his Mulberry debut. What is London Fashion Week asking of them?
Is London Fashion Week poised to reclaim its own mythology on the runway? With the SS27 season opening on 17 September, Alexander McQueen returns under the new creative direction of Seán McGirr, while Christopher Kane makes his Mulberry debut. The British Fashion Council, led by Laura Weir, has assembled a programme where established British names share the stage with a new generation of designers. Can London recover its edge without allowing its heritage to overshadow what comes next? Carolina Lecce, a London-based fashion writer and recent Istituto Marangoni alumna, looks beyond the return of two familiar names to ask what the city wants from them now.
After summer, everyone returns to something: routines, inboxes, morning coffees and gym memberships they will likely abandon by October. Fashion insiders, or at least the fashion-obsessed among us, return to a different kind of routine: the calendar. New York, London, Milan, Paris: the order is familiar and almost comforting.
Why Are McQueen and Christopher Kane Returning to London Fashion Week for SS27?
This season, London comes with a plot twist: two of British fashion’s main characters are back in the city. McQueen is back at London Fashion Week for the first time since Sarah Burton’s Spring/Summer 2023 show, now under the creative direction of Seán McGirr, who will present his first London show for the house. Christopher Kane takes a different route: instead of showing under his namesake label, he will debut his first collection for Mulberry.
Both returns carry distinct pressures and considerable expectations. McQueen shoulders the legacy of a maison whose mythology is deeply entwined with London’s darker, more theatrical imagination, while Kane brings the eccentric energy of a designer who has always known how to make British fashion feel strange and desirable at the same time.
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What Does Laura Weir Want London Fashion Week to Become?
SS27 already feels charged. The comebacks matter, but so does what they might mean for London as the city tries to feel culturally relevant, desirable and unpredictable again.
This renewed energy coincides with a new direction at the British Fashion Council, where Laura Weir has introduced a more ambitious tone to discussions around London Fashion Week. The challenge is to turn that attention into something more concrete, creating the conditions for fashion in the city to keep growing, taking risks, and retaining its force.
In the BFC’s official announcement of the provisional SS27 schedule, the new CEO described the season as “an exciting moment for London Fashion Week” and highlighted “the return of leading British brands alongside an exceptional new generation of creative talent.” This is not just about nostalgia; it is about uniting established names and a new generation of designers in a shared conversation about the future of British fashion.
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Can Seán McGirr Make McQueen Feel at Home in London?
McQueen’s return to London is not simply a matter of geography; it is about bringing the house back to the city where its mythology began. To borrow the most British expression possible, McQueen is coming home.
This is not football, of course. Here, home is less a place than a language. It’s the kind of London fashion I have always been drawn to, and the one Alexander McQueen helped bring into focus, with Isabella Blow playing an essential role in that story. Brilliant, contradictory and divisive in her own right, she believed in him early, bought his entire graduate collection after seeing it at Central Saint Martins and helped introduce Alexander McQueen to the wider fashion world before much of the industry understood what it was looking at.
Seán McGirr has already begun shaping his own McQueen in Paris, where his recent collections have explored instinct, nature, sharp tailoring, primal energy, and a darker sense of theatricality. By SS26, some of the house’s familiar obsessions were already visible in his work. McGirr also knows fashion—especially British fashion—from the inside out: before joining McQueen, he worked at JW Anderson, Dries Van Noten, Uniqlo, and Burberry.
Presenting his vision in London, however, means confronting a city with a particularly strong memory of what this house represents. The expectation isn’t just to see a good collection; it’s to see whether his McQueen can feel convincing in the place where the name first became impossible to ignore. That is what gives this homecoming its weight: McQueen is returning to a city that knows its history, contradictions, and intensity perhaps better than anywhere else.
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Can Christopher Kane Make Mulberry Feel Less Predictable?
Christopher Kane’s return works differently. If McQueen is the maison coming home, Kane is the British talent finding his way back through another door. Instead of returning to London Fashion Week with his namesake brand, he is doing so through Mulberry, where his first collection will also bring the British heritage label back to the runway.
The pairing feels far from random: Kane has long been perceived as one of London fashion’s main characters. His work helped shape a very particular idea of the city: intelligent, irreverent, and slightly wrong in the best possible way. Even early in his career, Suzy Menkes had already picked up on that contradiction, describing him in a 2013 interview as an “intriguing designer” with a “mix of sweet and dark spirit,” a definition that still feels remarkably accurate for someone whose work has never been entirely pretty or purely provocative, but has always existed somewhere in between.
Mulberry speaks a different kind of British language, one built around leather goods, countryside codes, practical luxury and a quieter, more rooted idea of heritage, while Kane has consistently pushed British fashion toward something less stable and harder to categorise. From neon bodycon dresses to lace, rubber and gel, Kane has developed a visual language that lives between attraction and discomfort.
That contrast makes this new chapter worth watching. Can Kane make Mulberry feel more desirable and its heritage less predictable, without losing what makes the brand recognisable in the first place? Laura Weir has also underlined the symbolic value of seeing Mulberry back on the London schedule, saying that one of her earliest ambitions as BFC CEO had been “to have iconic British brands return” to London Fashion Week.
With Kane now leading this new chapter, the moment feels larger than a simple comeback: it is about giving British fashion the chance to see just how far heritage can still be pushed.
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What Does London Fashion Week Need Beyond McQueen and Christopher Kane?
London Fashion Week may be regaining its main characters, but the real question is what their presence says about London itself. This is the kind of fashion I have always wanted to see: heritage that doesn’t become static, creativity that doesn’t behave too well, and beauty with something slightly off about it.
It is a city where a maison like McQueen can bring back its ghosts, where Christopher Kane can make Mulberry feel less predictable, but also where emerging designers can still stand next to the biggest names on the calendar without fading into the background.
London’s real power has always come from risk, contradiction, chaos, instinct and a kind of desirability that does not need to be polished to be convincing. That is why I am excited, and maybe a little anxious, to see whether these two appearances become lasting fashion week moments, and whether McQueen and Kane can each write a new chapter in London fashion history in their own way.
And, as one of my favourite recent TikTok trends would put it, what a privilege to live in London and witness it.
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