"Lee Alexander McQueen forged (no pun) a partnership with Shaun Leane, then a conservative goldsmith working in Hatton Garden. They met in 1994, when McQueen asked Leane to create delicate T-bar watch-fobs, based on Victorian originals. He wasn't sure how McQueen would use them: he certainly didn't anticipate that the designer would roughly push them through holes hacked in the crotch of fine wool skirts for his boundary-breaking Highland Rape collection."
"For his Autumn/Winter 2025 McQueen collection, Seán McGirr looked back to the Victorian era also, for a collection dedicated to the dandy, the black prince of elegance. McGirr picked the sunflower as his key motif because, in typical McQueen fashion, that bloom has an innate duality: 150 years or so ago, sunflowers could simultaneously symbolise loyalty, adoration and longevity, alongside vainglorious pride and false riches."
Jewellery played a central role throughout McQueen's creative output, beginning with a partnership between Lee Alexander McQueen and goldsmith Shaun Leane in Hatton Garden. The collaboration started in 1994 with delicate Victorian-inspired T-bar watch-fobs. McQueen repurposed those ornaments provocatively, even forcing them through holes in fine skirts for his Highland Rape collection. Subsequent pieces combined sacred and profane imagery, including coiled-metal corsets and crowns of thorns paired with 19th-century mourning colours. For Autumn/Winter 2025, Seán McGirr revisited Victorian dandyism and made the sunflower a key motif to embody loyalty and vainglory. A bracelet exemplifies that duality: a crystal fringe and fashioned sunflower opposite a thorn-like spiny silver cuff.
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