McQueen’s Fall Winter 2025 campaign arrives like a voltage drop: a study in freedom and subversion that borrows from the codes of the Victorian Gothic and replays them in a language of modern dress. Photographed and directed by Glen Luchford, the images move from poise to abandon. Figures held tight, then released, bathed in a spectral light that heightens the work’s physicality.
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Creative Director Seán McGirr frames the season as a conversation with 19th-century provocateurs, Oscar Wilde, Vesta Tilley, Romaine Brooks, whose unapologetic self-invention still rattles the present. “The collection was rooted in the uncompromising self-expression of independent thinkers,” he notes, “exploring the tension between tradition and transgression.” That friction feels timely; the clothes consider identity, idealism, and gender through cut and attitude rather than manifesto.
On the body, silk georgette ripples out of shadow into light; raw-edged lace reads precious and perilous at once; sharpened tailoring slices across the frame; black lacquered leather anchors everything with a gloss that feels ceremonial. Luchford’s camera lingers on movement, bodies arch, twist, writhe, then pulls back to show the group held together by a wordless force. The choreography’s arc (by Benoit Swan Pouffer) mirrors the narrative: restraint tipping into rapturous release.
Styling by Sarah Richardson keeps silhouettes disciplined and charged, long, clean lines interrupted by slashes of lace, corseted tensions under coats, boots that strike. The soundtrack choice, “Overcome” (performed by Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird), threads a rich, textural pulse through the film cut, deepening the campaign’s mood of ecstatic control.
The cast, Alex Consani, Athiec Geng, Chu Wong, Libby Taverner,embodies McQueen’s dualities: elegance that can bruise, romance with teeth. Production design by Max Bellhouse and art direction by Christopher Simmonds build a world where the Gothic is less costume than current, a set of gestures that travel from ballroom to backroom without losing edge.
