McQueen went home this season, and I think it was the right call. The show was staged in the undercroft of Lincoln's Inn Chapel in London, a seventeenth-century chamber with a flagstone floor etched with the names of long-dead spymasters, lawyers and preachers.

Seán McGirr used that room to set up a fight between the neoclassically sacred and the chemically profane, which he summed up as "that clashing of things." He pointed to Piero della Francesca on one side and London rave culture on the other. I love a designer who admits the mess is the point, and McQueen has always been better messy than polished.

If I had to pick the idea that holds the whole show together, it is the tailoring. 18 of the 46 looks have a tailored jacket, and the cut comes from Huntsman, the house that tailored Alexander McQueen himself, sketched to echo Tommy Nutter, whom McGirr called the first rebel of Savile Row.

What I like is that the discipline is real. The shoulders close over like furled angel wings, the lines are precise, and then a thick leather collar goes around the neck and the whole thing tips from the office into the club. It is a small move and it changes the meaning of the suit completely.

The evening dresses are where the show gets theatrical. McGirr builds grand, classic gowns and then sabotages them: harnesses by Shaun Leane, warped shapes of stretched fabric thrown across lacquered satin bodices, open-back corsets that fly up above the shoulder line.

There is a dress made of interlinked hand-embroidered metal skulls, each one different, and metallic leaves scattered across tailoring as if the wind had just dropped them there. Sixteen looks reach the floor or trail behind the model, and I think the sabotage is what keeps those from reading as costume. A gown that is slightly wrong feels like a person wearing it.

Honestly, the sporty knit shorts and skirts with color piping, the mesh and the perforated leather are the pieces that make this wearable for a normal night out. They push the show toward ravewear without asking you to dress like a gothic cathedral. I would skip the horned headpieces unless you are fully committed, because five of them are plenty and they only work with total conviction.

The color is the surprise, with diffuse, smeared hues that look like the retina glitching at four in the morning, and only nine looks are fully black. McGirr's own rule is that you can let the dark stuff into your work but not into your life, and you should have a good time. I would take that as a dress code.