Kering Cuts Seán McGirr After McQueen Overbuilt Its Shops

On October 15, Alexander McQueen said Seán McGirr will leave as creative director, closing a three-year run. New creative leadership will be named soon. The house is already being taken apart on the commercial side, with shops, jobs, and a sneaker-heavy mix under a two-year profit clock set by Kering chief executive Luca de Meo.

Kering Ends Seán McGirr’s Three Years at McQueen

Kering published the news on a Thursday and thanked McGirr in the same breath as it told the market what comes next. De Meo used the statement to set a tailoring-and-rebellion brief for whoever follows him, and to pin that brief on the founder, Lee Alexander McQueen.

I would like to thank Seán for his contribution and dedication to Alexander McQueen. Our ambition is to establish a bold new direction for the House, building on its unique heritage of exceptional tailoring, uncompromising creativity and rebellion to reaffirm its position as one of the most innovative and culturally relevant voices in luxury.

Luca de Meo, CEO of Kering, October 15 statement

Gianfranco D’Attis, McQueen’s president and chief executive, said McGirr had approached the house with respect for its history while putting his own stamp on it, and that his work helped reconnect the label with London. McGirr, who is Dublin-born and was appointed in October 2023 after leading ready-to-wear at JW Anderson, answered in the same register. He said his vision sat in the gap between “raw, visceral, human beauty” and the house’s precision, and that he was proud the studio had anchored itself in contemporary culture. He thanked the atelier and said he looks forward to his next chapter.

None of that language names a successor, a last collection beyond the one already shown, or a sale of the brand. It reads as a planned break inside a rebuild that started months earlier, when Kering put a former Prada chief in the McQueen corner office and told investors the shop list would shrink.

135 Stores and a Sneaker Mix That Stopped Paying

De Meo has been blunt about how McQueen got here. The house opened a peak of 135 stores worldwide and, at one point, let sneakers account for as much as 80 percent of sales. That is a dangerous mix for a label whose reputation was built on cut, theatre, and a tight London attitude, because a store network of that size only pays when a high-volume product keeps walking out the door.

When the volume product cooled, the overhead did not. Italian unions have described a drop in sales of around 60 percent between 2022 and 2025, a figure Kering has not repeated as a brand disclosure, and they have called the Italian books an emergency. De Meo’s own diagnosis, laid out at Kering’s Capital Markets Day in Florence on April 16, was that McQueen had leaned too hard on a narrow product base, lost clarity, and needed women’s ready-to-wear, tailoring, and eveningwear back at the centre, with fewer collections and a much smaller retail net.

MCQUEEN’S COMMERCIAL RESET

The 50 percent shop cut is measured against the end of 2025, not against that 135-store peak, so the two figures are not a simple half-of-135 sum. Some doors had already gone before the Florence presentation. Across Kering, the group closed 75 net stores in 2025 and another 84 in the first half of 2026, toward a 2026 target of 100, as first-half revenue reached €7,220 million, up 1 percent on a comparable basis and down 3 percent as reported. McQueen is a slice of that, not the whole, but it is one of the houses de Meo has put on a short leash.

He has said a luxury brand has to make money, and that houses which do not will be pushed out of the system. McQueen, Brioni, Ginori 1735, and Pomellato were named in that underperforming group. The designer change on October 15 sits inside that threat, not beside it.

Why the House Is Cutting Half Its Shops

Kering is cutting McQueen’s store count by half by the end of 2026, compared with the end of 2025, because the old network was built for a sneaker-led, high-door model that stopped covering its costs. The same plan rightsizes jobs in Italy and London, and it put a new chief executive in London in June with orders to sharpen the brand and improve the numbers.

Kering named D’Attis as McQueen’s chief executive on June 1, with a start date of June 3. He reports to de Meo and is based in London. The group said he brought more than 25 years in luxury, including a run as chief executive of Prada, and earlier posts at LVMH and Richemont. He succeeds Gianfilippo Testa, who had decided to leave later in the year. The June note already described the next phase in the language of a smaller machine: focused collections, a rightsized retail network, a leaner organisation, and better financial performance.

Kering’s first-half results, published in July, said McQueen had sped up that work under D’Attis, aiming to stand as a British authority in tailoring and occasion wear while it shrank distribution. That is the commercial sentence the October 15 creative-director announcement completes. The product brief was written before the designer was removed.

WHERE THE CUTS FALL

• Italy: Collective redundancy proceedings put 54 of 181 McQueen staff in the country at risk, almost a third of that workforce, with 38 of those roles in Novara and the rest across sites in Scandicci and Parabiago.
• The May strike: Unions Filctem Cgil, Femca Cisl, and Uiltec Uil led a stoppage on May 20 over the Italy plan, after accusing the group of moving too fast on jobs.
• The June deal: On June 4 those unions signed an agreement with Kering at Italy’s Ministry of Labor that postponed unilateral layoffs until September and opened talks on severance incentives.
• London headquarters: A strategic review that began in October 2025 put about 55 roles at the London office at risk, about a fifth of that site.
• The shops: De Meo’s Florence plan halves the store net by the end of 2026 versus the end of 2025, and the Bond Street flagship at 27 Old Bond Street is due to move to a new site on the same street in the final quarter of 2026.

The Italy headcount after September has not been published in a fresh Kering note, so the 54 figure remains the last clear number on paper, not a confirmed final tally of people who left. What is confirmed is the direction. Fewer doors, fewer people, and a product mix that has to live on clothes that cost more to make than a sneaker.

The London Show Already Spoke the New Brief

McGirr’s last runway did not look like a designer fighting the new brief. It looked like someone trying to answer it. On September 20 he staged the Spring 2027 show in Lincoln’s Inn, in the undercroft of the chapel, 25 days before Kering said he was leaving. It was the house’s first official London Fashion Week slot since 2001, after years on the Paris calendar.

The house’s own show notes put the argument in his words. “This collection is a celebration of London’s ceaselessly stimulating and transcendent power. McQueen is a London-born house, and the city’s uncompromising attitude and subversive spirit sit at its very heart.” The clothes chased that split: smoked tulle and acid florals on glass organza against lacquered satin and leather; sculptural angel-wing tailoring against tall, strict suits. Three bespoke men’s looks were cut with Huntsman of Savile Row, the house’s third collaboration with that tailor after 2002 and 2012, in British wools with an exaggerated shoulder and a high, narrow waist. Huntsman dates its own craft to 177 years of Savile Row work, which is exactly the lineage de Meo now wants on the balance sheet.

Master jeweller Shaun Leane, who first worked with Lee McQueen in 1995, made a recycled-silver body harness for the show through his new atelier, 12, and the house brought back two archive headpieces, from autumn/winter 1998’s Joan and autumn/winter 2004’s Pantheon ad Lucem. Karen Elson wore the new harness. Guests included Emilia Clarke, Emma Corrin, Florence Welch, Salma Hayek Pinault, and Siouxsie Sioux. The soundtrack was A. G. Cook with the choir Shards Voices, over flagstones that still name the dead under the seats.

Look 41

Sculptural beauty. Spiral pleated silk organza dress, with a sheer, elongated bodice. Intricate metallic silver iris embroidery.

Spring Summer 2027 show — The Undercroft at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, London

Creative Director: Seán McGirr
Art Director: SJ Todd
Video:… pic.twitter.com/WJbDAdaLCt

— McQueen (@McQueen) October 1, 2026

D’Attis said in September the house is committed to showing in London from here on, and that the next creative director will debut there. So the city is not in dispute. The dispute is who gets to use it. McGirr had just taken the house home, put Savile Row and Leane on the same floor, and dressed the sacred-versus-rave story the founder made famous. Then the parent company said it needed a bold new direction built on tailoring, creativity, and rebellion, which is a near-copy of what that show had already tried to be.

Sarah Burton’s 13 Years Set a Hard Comparison

The job McGirr walked into was never a clean slate. Sarah Burton held the creative-director title for 13 years and spent 26 years inside the company, taking over after Lee McQueen’s death in 2010. She left in 2023. McGirr, born in 1987, arrived from JW Anderson, where he had joined as head of menswear in 2020 and then led ready-to-wear. Before that he designed womenswear at Dries Van Noten and worked at Burberry and at Christophe Lemaire’s Uniqlo studio. He studied at Central Saint Martins and has worked as a photographer. He was the first creative director of the house who had not come up beside Lee.

His debut in March 2024, shown in an industrial space outside Paris and nodding at Lee’s 1995 Birds collection, met a cold room. The silhouettes were looser, the attitude younger, and the comparison with Burton’s tailored line was instant. A second Paris show drew a warmer read, more pulled-together, more wearable. The London return was the first time the calendar itself matched the biography of the house, which Lee founded in the city in 1992.

The early doubt never really left the conversation. After that first McGirr show, the clothes were called a thinner copy of the archive, cheaper than the name on the door, and more commercial than Burton’s. Those complaints are taste, not a profit-and-loss statement, but they matter in a rebuild that now hangs on desirability. A house that needs eveningwear and tailoring to replace sneakers cannot afford a creative director whose first impression was “less than Lee.” Three years is a short sentence next to Burton’s 13, and it is the sentence Kering chose to end.

FROM BURTON’S EXIT TO MCGIRR’S

1. October 3, 2023: Kering appoints McGirr creative director, succeeding Burton.
2. March 2024: He shows his debut in Paris to mixed, often harsh, first-night reaction.
3. April 16, 2026: De Meo tells investors McQueen will run 50 percent fewer stores by the end of 2026 and put women’s ready-to-wear, tailoring, and eveningwear at the core.
4. June 3, 2026: D’Attis starts as chief executive in London, four months before the designer’s exit.
5. September 20, 2026: McGirr shows Spring 2027 in Lincoln’s Inn, the first official London Fashion Week slot since 2001.
6. October 9, 2026: Saint Laurent announces that Anthony Vaccarello is leaving after a 10-year run.
7. October 15, 2026: McQueen says McGirr will leave, 25 days after the London show, and that new creative leadership will follow.

Read as a calendar, the designer was not the first lever Kering pulled. The shop plan, the Italy jobs, and the new chief executive all landed while McGirr was still in the studio. The October 15 note is the last public one, not the first cut.

Saint Laurent Went First, Then McQueen

Six days before McGirr’s exit, Kering posted that Vaccarello was leaving Saint Laurent, a much larger house, after a decade. The two announcements are not the same story, but they are the same owner, in the same month, clearing creative chairs while de Meo tries to reset a group that employed 44,000 people and booked €14.7 billion in revenue in 2025. Gucci remains the weight-bearing wall. McQueen is a smaller, wounded house being told to get smaller still, then get sharper.

That is a brutal brief for whoever takes the studio. They will show in London, which D’Attis has already locked in. They will sell tailoring and occasion wear into a shop list that is supposed to be half the size it was at the end of 2025. They will do it without the old sneaker engine, and with an audience that still measures every collection against a founder who died in 2010 and a successor who lasted 13 years. McGirr’s last show tried to dress that brief in angel wings, Savile Row wool, and recycled silver. Kering still wants the brief. It does not want him to carry it.

New creative leadership, the house said, will be announced soon. That person inherits a London calendar, a halved door list, and a written order to make money from cut and evening clothes. The shops are already closing. The designer’s chair is now empty as well.