Alexander McQueen is coming back to London Fashion Week, and its old shows explain why everyone's excited

Alexander McQueen is heading back to London Fashion Week for spring/summer 2027, its first time on the schedule since Sarah Burton's 2023 show in Greenwich.

The announcement has sent fashion writers straight back to a scrappy, low-budget chapter of the brand's history that has very little to do with the polished house it is today: the Gatliff Road Warehouse years.

Between 1998 and 2001, Lee Alexander McQueen staged several shows in a rundown former bus depot near Victoria station, beginning with a collection nicknamed Golden Shower. There was no budget for spectacle in the traditional sense. Instead, McQueen built spectacle out of robots, mirrors and live moths, and in doing so created the moments that still get cited whenever anyone tries to explain why he matters.

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The robots that made him cry

The clearest example is No. 13, staged on 27 September 1998. Former ballerina Shalom Harlow stood on a rotating platform in the centre of a plain wooden runway while two industrial paint-spraying robots, borrowed from a car manufacturing plant, appeared to interact with her, gently at first, then violently, coating her white dress in black and yellow paint. The piece restaged an installation by artist Rebecca Horn called High Moon. McQueen later said it was the only one of his shows that actually made him cry.

It remains one of the most replayed clips in fashion history, not because the clothes were extraordinary, but because the moment functioned as performance art that happened to be selling a collection.

A glass box and a body fashion refused to celebrate

Two years later, Voss pushed the warehouse concept further. McQueen built an enormous one-way mirrored box at the centre of the room. Guests could see in; the models trapped inside could see nothing but their own reflections. The set resembled a padded cell in a psychiatric hospital, with models dressed in glass, feathers and shell.

The finale has become the show's defining image. The lights inside the box rose to reveal not a model but writer Michelle Olley, unclothed, wearing a breathing mask and surrounded by live moths, in a direct restaging of a 1983 photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin. The scene was widely read as a deliberate challenge to the fashion industry's narrow idea of beauty, staged inside the very glass box meant to insulate the audience from feeling implicated in the act of looking.

The same set-piece technique returned for The Overlook in 1999, a snow-pale, Shining-inspired collection of knitwear and crystal staged inside another glass enclosure. It was the first McQueen show attended by Vogue's Anna Wintour.

The carousel that ended it all, and the skull that began

McQueen's final Gatliff Road show, What a Merry-Go-Round, closed the era in February 2001 with a set built around a fairground carousel, soundtracked partly by the voice of the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. By the finale, the floor was scattered with discarded childhood toys.

Buried among the look's military tailoring and taxidermy pheasant-claw jewellery was a small skull motif on a black jumper, the first appearance of what would become one of the brand's most recognisable signatures. It was also McQueen's last major show staged in his home city before every future collection moved to Paris.

That history is precisely why McQueen's return to London carries weight beyond a scheduling change. The brand is currently fronted by Seán McGirr, only the second creative director the house has had since Lee McQueen's death in 2010, following Sarah Burton's thirteen-year tenure. He will be staging his London comeback in the same city where the brand once turned a freezing bus depot into one of fashion's most studied creative laboratories. Whether McGirr can summon even a fraction of that same unease remains the real story to watch.