McQueen AW26: What Lies Beneath
Glen Luchford shoots Karen Elson, Paloma Elsesser, Jacqui Hooper and Xiao Wen for McQueen AW26 and the result is a campaign about what happens when the mask finally slips.
There is a particular kind of fashion campaign that does not just show you clothes. It gets under your skin. McQueen’s Autumn Winter 2026 campaign, shot by Glen Luchford, is very much one of those.
The concept is built around a tension that anyone who has ever put on a carefully considered outfit will recognise immediately: the gap between the face you present to the world and the one you actually wear in private. Seán McGirr frames this as a kind of psychological thriller, moving between scenes where the fourth wall slips and the performance starts to crack. Precision gives way to something rawer and more instinctive. Control gives way to desire.
Karen Elson, Paloma Elsesser, Jacqui Hooper and Xiao Wen are the ones doing the cracking, each of them meeting the camera with a gaze that refuses to be comfortable or easily read. They bridge the past and present of the house in a way that feels entirely earned rather than nostalgic.
The clothes themselves are doing exactly the same thing. Sharpened precision tailoring, the kind rooted in the Savile Row tradition McQueen has always carried close, sits alongside sculptural evening silhouettes in fluid silk georgette. Trompe l’oeil feather embroideries and ornate lace demand you look closer, want you to reach out and touch. It is fashion that rewards proximity, a collection built as much for the person inside it as for anyone watching from a distance.
Dark, rigorous, confronting and genuinely beautiful. McGirr’s McQueen keeps getting more interesting.
