By Fashion Editorial Staff
Iconoclastic luxury house McQueen unveils an exclusive capsule collection that reaffirms its enduring devotion to dark beauty and artisanal mastery. The 2025 Evening Clutch Capsule Collection, launched April 14th, reimagines the iconic Knuckle Clutch in six striking variations that merge archival motifs with intricate embellishment.
First introduced by Lee Alexander McQueen in 2009, the Knuckle Clutch quickly became one of the house’s most recognizable accessories. Its four-finger grip—a refined nod to brass knuckles—embodied McQueen’s signature tension between fragility and aggression, elegance and edge. Sixteen years later, the clutch returns as the centerpiece of this new capsule, rendered with reverence and reinvention.
The collection unfolds across three distinct design narratives, each offered in gold and silver-tone metals that echo the house’s heritage in fine jewelry. One design resurrects a motif from Spring/Summer 2018: a British garden snake coiled around a single rose, crowned by McQueen’s signature skull. Cast in precious metal, the sculptural handle becomes a gothic miniature. Its black leather body—embroidered with hand-applied glass crystals and beads—blooms like a midnight garden, catching light in hypnotic flashes.
Another variation, first seen in Autumn/Winter 2015, draws from McQueen’s enduring English Rose narrative. Mirror-polished metal roses crown the handle, their reflective surface glowing with quiet brilliance. Below, jet-black faceted crystals are embroidered onto satin, creating a lush, tactile contrast—dramatic and unmistakably McQueen.
Perhaps the most intricate design revisits a piece from Autumn/Winter 2019. Four individual rings form the grip, each set with a faceted stone—one encircled by an exquisitely detailed spider, a symbol of nature’s darker beauty. It comes in two versions: one with multicolored crystal embellishments on satin with gold hardware, the other featuring all-over glass bead and crystal embroidery on black leather with silver. Both distill gothic opulence to its purest form.
These are more than accessories—they are feats of craftsmanship. Each piece represents hundreds of hours of meticulous handwork, from lost-wax jewelry casting to the precision embroidery executed in the McQueen atelier. Thousands of stones are individually applied to create a depth and dimensionality rarely seen in contemporary eveningwear.
The Evening Clutch Capsule arrives at a moment of renewed appetite for theatrical dressing. After seasons of minimalist restraint, these sculptural pieces signal a return to fashion’s embrace of fantasy—an unapologetic celebration of ornament, artistry, and the transformative power of a singular accessory.
Available in strictly limited quantities at select Alexander McQueen boutiques and online at AlexanderMcQueen.com, the clutches are destined to become collector’s items: objects of dark, delicate beauty that continue the house’s legacy of rebellion, romance, and radical craftsmanship under the creative direction of Seán McGirr.