It was announced yesterday that Seán McGirr is leaving Alexander McQueen. The Irish designer joined the brand in 2023 and showed his final collection less than a month ago, during London Fashion Week. When the news of his departure broke, the fashion press and online community raced to be the quickest to cover the news on social media.
While the same mad scramble occurs whenever an announcement like this is made, the difference in yesterday’s posts was the opinions that came with them. Comment sections were flooded with users rejoicing, while influencers made snarky jibes, often descending into outright nastiness. In the chaotic rush to react, the line between fashion criticism and cruelty quickly began to blur.
Regardless of your opinion on McGirr’s three years at McQueen, there is a difference between constructive fashion criticism and unnecessary cruelty. The online community loves to remind us of Lee McQueen’s heyday – clips from his Joan, Voss and No.13 collections circulate on a near-daily basis – and already, there are a number of reels and TikTok videos dissecting who would be best to restore the house’s greatness. But while McQueen’s collections are romanticised, the immense pressure he was under is often forgotten.
Given the brand’s history – Lee McQueen died by suicide in 2010 after years spent working under the immense pressures of the fashion industry – the glee surrounding McGirr’s departure feels particularly uncomfortable. “How vile the fashion industry is,” wrote India Knight in 2007, “and how tiresome it is always to have to pretend that it is fabulous and gorgeous and somehow magical.” Knight’s Times article, headlined ‘Fashion has a rotten heart’, was published in the wake of Isabella Blow’s death – the stylist and fashion editor, who helped launch McQueen’s career, died by suicide three years before the designer’s death.
“Fashion eats people up and spits them out in a way that sends shivers down your spine,” she writes. The article criticises the fashion industry for not supporting Blow – according to Knight, barely anyone in fashion visited her during her time at the Priory, a well-known mental health clinic. The circumstances are obviously incomparable to McGirr’s departure, but Knight’s broader point about an industry that can forget the person behind the image still resonates. We’ve all witnessed the corrosive power of social media, whether in our own lives or in global headlines. I don’t know McGirr personally, but he is active on the same platforms where much of this commentary is circulating.
If McGirr was an awkward fit for the house, responsibility also lies with those who handed a relatively unknown designer one of fashion’s greatest poisoned chalices. Few designers could comfortably live up to what is expected of McQueen, but McGirr had the added challenge of being an untested creative director with no obvious links to the brand (other than being taught by Louise Wilson).
In Knight’s 2007 article, she criticises Isabella Blow’s obituaries for depicting her as “little more than a great eccentric and a creature of fashion,” and forgetting that she was also a human being with thoughts and feelings. Depressingly, two decades later, I find myself saying almost the same thing: Seán McGirr is a human being with thoughts, feelings and an Instagram account too.
It goes without saying that fashion criticism is necessary and of great importance – the late Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz thanked journalist Suzy Menkes for her harsh reviews, which ultimately influenced his work. But in an age when everybody with a phone is a fashion critic, there is still a difference between interrogating someone’s work and turning their professional failure into communal entertainment. Words have consequences, and there are ways to make a point without joining a public pile-on – particularly when countless other people are doing the same thing at exactly the same time.