Music Has Always Been Part of the Story
Alexander McQueen has never treated music as background noise. Sound has always shaped the storytelling, from Lee McQueen’s earliest, most confrontational shows to Seán McGirr’s current run at the house. Sometimes it’s a literally scripted score. Sometimes it’s a single unexpected track that redefines how a collection gets remembered. Here’s how that’s evolved, season by season, era by era.
The Lee McQueen Era: Music as Provocation
Long before “runway soundtrack” became its own genre of internet obsession, McQueen built tracklists that unsettled as much as the clothes did. His 1995 show “The Birds” ran to German techno producer WestBam. It sounded jarring and mechanical, nothing like the orchestral drama the house is known for today. By 2002, McQueen was mixing Missy Elliott against Björk and classical Spanish guitar in the same set. That genre-blending instinct still defines the brand’s music choices decades later.
One name recurs throughout McQueen’s history more than almost any other: Siouxsie and the Banshees. Their track “Hong Kong Garden” turns up repeatedly across his shows. Siouxsie Sioux herself became a personal touchstone for the designer. That’s what makes her front-row appearance at McGirr’s SS27 show, staged in a London chapel decades later, feel less like a coincidence and more like the house remembering its own bloodline.
By 2007, McQueen pushed further into live performance. He commissioned a full chamber orchestra to perform Handel’s “Sarabande,” marking the moment the house’s relationship with music shifted from curated playlist to composed score.
Sarah Burton: Continuity Through Orchestration
Sarah Burton led the house for over a decade after Lee McQueen’s death, and she leaned further into live orchestral sound. In 2019, she commissioned composer Isobel Waller-Bridge and the London Contemporary Orchestra to score the SS20 show. The piece, adapted from Waller-Bridge’s own album, was built specifically to mirror the “fierce energy” of that season’s collection. The relationship extended into McQueen’s own Spotify channel, #McQueenMusic, curated by John Gosling, the house’s longtime show-soundtrack director of over 20 years. The playlists blend orchestral pieces with the techno and pop needle-drops that ran through decades of shows.
Burton’s final show for the house, SS24, closed with David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Press widely read the choice as a deliberate, emotional farewell to her tenure.
Seán McGirr: Reinventing the Sound, Season by Season
McGirr’s era has been defined by rapid evolution. He’s visibly testing different sonic identities before settling into a signature.
- AW24 (debut): McGirr staged his first show in a disused industrial market on the outskirts of Paris. It closed with an unexpected needle-drop, Enya’s “Orinoco Flow,” a soft, nostalgic nod that stood out against the show’s harder visual codes.
- AW25: McGirr shifted toward UK dance and electronic sounds, pulling from Joy Orbison, John Glacier, D-Breeze, and The Soft Boys.
- SS26: The turning point. McGirr commissioned A.G. Cook, the PC Music founder now working across pop’s biggest names, to produce an original score for the first time. He staged it inside a Wicker Man-inspired set built from hessian ribbon and foliage. The music moved deliberately between acoustic and synthesised, mirroring the show’s tension between ritual and unease.
- AW26: McGirr continued the collaboration with Cook, cementing it as a recurring creative partnership rather than a one-off experiment.
- SS27: McQueen returned to London for the first time since 2023, staging the show in the Undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel. A.G. Cook returned once more, this time joined by London choir Shard Voices for a live choral moment inside the medieval space. Sacred architecture met electronic production. (Some reports also credit “In The Middle (Baltra Remix)” by Art School Girlfriend as part of the show’s soundtrack, worth noting since McQueen shows, now as in the past, often layer more than one musical moment into a single collection.)
The Through-Line
A 1995 WestBam techno track and a 2026 choir singing inside a chapel share one thing: intent, not genre. McQueen has always used sound to narrate rather than decorate. McGirr’s decision to make A.G. Cook a recurring composer echoes the same instinct Lee McQueen and Sarah Burton had before him: find one collaborator who understands the house, and let them build something that couldn’t exist anywhere else. The clothes change designers. The instinct to treat music as a co-author of the collection hasn’t.