In the years when Alexander McQueen reigned over Cool Britannia, Seán McGirr was coming of age beside the Irish Sea in the Dublin neighbourhood of Bayside – a ’60s suburb with a medieval Kilbarrack graveyard – with his bedroom walls lined with tickets from emo concerts. His mother, Eileen, a fertility nurse, can trace her eldest’s obsession with design back to the hours and hours he spent building amazing structures out of Lego as a three-year-old, while his mechanic father, Brendan, remembers McGirr whiling away rainy Saturdays hanging around his Dublin garage.
McGirr returns to Bayside when he can, where he and his family “stay up until 1 or 2am, pouring our hearts out to each other”, McGirr says, adding that they can quickly disabuse him of any notions of grandeur he may have acquired: “When they saw me on the carpet with Lana at The Met, they were like, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ I was like, ‘I’m sorry! I just made a dress! I’m no one!’”
“I guess I have this sort of Celtic kinship with McQueen,” he tells me over lunch in the geranium-filled courtyard of La Famiglia, an old-school Italian restaurant off the King’s Road, in August. “We both, weirdly, have tartans,” he adds – although Lee’s, he says, “is way more chic”. On weekends in the ’90s and ’00s, McGirr and his family would travel “deep, deep, deep in the countryside” to the hundred-odd-person village of Lahardane near Ireland’s west coast, where one of Seán’s maternal uncles had a pub. From the age of 10, he collected empties there and heard the punters recount the folklore that McQueen was riffing on.
Despite all of that, McGirr says, “For me, McQueen is about London – there’s an attitude in the city that’s very visceral, but very refined at the same time.” (While his banshees might have their roots in Gaelic folklore, they’re more likely to appear outside Trisha’s, an underground Soho dive, at 5am.) It’s why, even though the job has his “one-hundred-million-and-20-per-cent dedication at all times”, he’s still out and about as much as possible, making frequent excursions across the city by bicycle: to the exhibition of Francis Bacon’s paintings at the National Portrait Gallery; to a gig by the art rock band Still House Plants south of the Thames; and, yes, to the occasional “queer rave in some back-ass place”. (“Sometimes,” he adds, “you need a good stomp.”) We’ve just been to see the glass hammers and wish trees of Tate Modern’s Yoko Ono retrospective – Yoko being, McGirr feels, “very McQueen in her fearlessness”.
