For Autumn/Winter 2025, Seán McGirr gives the sunflower a delicate fringe of crystal and chain with a thorn-like spiny silver cuff
Jewellery has been part of the McQueen universe from its nascence: 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. Later McQueen jewellery pieces were both sacred and profane: corsets of coiled metal and roses, sacrilegious crowns of thorns worn with clothes in the colours of 19th century mourning dress. 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. There’s two sides to this bracelet too, the delicate fringe of crystal and chain and finely fashioned sunflower contradicted by the thorn-like shape of the spiny silver cuff, wrapping the hand like a knuckle duster.
The Sunflower Hand jewellery is available to purchase now.
