PARIS — The fashion world is in its Gatsby era.

So much effort, money and glamour are poured into the creation of myths, fantasies and beautiful lies, but it’s all in the service of repeating the past. Conglomerates, namely LVMH and Kering, want designers who will modernize what everyone already knows about brands founded decades ago — to update the codes, though no designer who put their name on an atelier door before the 21st century really thought in those terms.

And consumers and fashion observers want things that have the power and mystique of fashion from decades ago — even if it wasn’t that great to begin with, and even if those vocalizing these cravings weren’t around to witness the moments to begin with.

The great tension of fashion today is not whether people want something, even though that’s really what it comes down to when you’re standing in front of a rack in a store, or looking at the smooth styling of an online luxury retailer. It’s whether a designer lives up to everyone’s imagined ideal of what came before them and how they can match it.

That conundrum is just one reason the debut of 35-year-old designer Seán McGirr at Alexander McQueen on Saturday night in Paris was the most anticipated of the season, perhaps even in recent memory.

McGirr, who spent three years at JW Anderson, is not in an enviable position, even though virtually every designer around his age grew up idolizing McQueen. He replaces Sarah Burton, the beloved successor of the label’s founder, Lee McQueen (Alexander was his middle name), who replaced the designer after he died by suicide in 2010. McQueen was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a master tailor who poured his traumas and demons into his collections, stunning and emotionally bruising his audiences.

There are other reasons that all eyes were on McGirr, and why hundreds of editors, influencers and celebrities, as well as Kering head François-Henri Pinault and his wife, Salma Hayek, trekked to a far-out corner of Paris on a nasty, rainy night, shivering in a semi-outdoor space to see what he’d cooked up. McGirr’s appointment to McQueen in October ignited a debate about the lack of female creative directors at Kering, which owns the brand, and in fashion in general. So many White men with the same haircut in charge, and so many skilled women passed over. Hmph.

So what did McGirr deliver? Decent tailoring — not up to McQueen’s or Burton’s standards, but decent — along with wannabe dodgy boys in skinny suits, cinched leather coats and jaunty hats. There were attempts at perversion: He put models in okay coats with hoof-like shoes, one gray ponytail swinging from the heel. He made big sweaters — a skill he would have honed at JW Anderson, but also a McQueenism.

It was sexy at times — the opening dress, of shiny black jersey, had the model’s hands stuffed inside — though clearly less often than the designer intended. There was a bit of cheekiness, bordering on cheesecake: Enya on the soundtrack, with her “Orinoco Flow” as his finale music. McGirr’s models walked with odd wobbles or arms akimbo, something you can’t just throw out there after John Galliano made weird walks so haunting in his January couture show for Maison Margiela.

Overall, it was a bit art school senior thesis, too happy-go-lucky to persuade us that these creatures were genuinely unsavory outsiders. One model, in an electric yellow knit skirt and cardigan with a matching tube top, wore a death stare and swung and dragged a rather normie studded bag like a battle ax. You wondered what this woman, dressed as if she were on her way to a music festival sponsored by something mundanely late-capitalist, such as a company that promises to disrupt water, had to be so angry about.

McQueen, especially in his prime, when Kering became an investor and he was able to use his Savile Row-shaped skills on fine materials from Paris, was exacting, sophisticated, if emotionally stunted at times. To please the Gatsby-ites, the show could have looked perfect, or it could have looked angry and insane. Instead, it was neither.

Backstage, McGirr, who is boyish like a Sally Rooney love interest, said he wants his McQueen to be “uplifting.” He’s as sweet as pie: His big plans for the night were to get a hug from his mother and take a bath. He also said that he’s attracted to these “outsider” characters, and that McQueen’s attachment to “people on the fringes” is “more relevant than ever.”

“I’m kind of into this idea of anti-politeness, because we live in a very uniform time,” McGirr said, though his collection had the manners of a Spice Girl meeting the queen.

The issue here is bigger than McGirr. The fashion world can’t afford to support designers with demons; it moves too fast and asks too much of its designers. But it’s not like the designer has to live the life to make great clothes; there are plenty of people who make odd and even upsetting art who run stable businesses. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Balenciaga’s Demna and Simone Rocha all come to mind.

Besides, is emotional stability really something we should ask a designer to sacrifice to make great art? And maybe McGirr does have something inside to unleash in his clothes. (You never know how a new role or creative challenge will change you.) He only started in October, after all.

When you look at a debut, you have to decide whether there is potential for a designer to grow into something exceptional (or at least amusing). McGirr seems like an eager student of his new house, and ideas like his tall, stiff shield tops and oversize knits could evolve into something more sophisticated. Studying McQueen — as many people have, thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2011 blockbuster exhibition — opens a whole new world of seeing fashion. McGirr may soon find himself corrupted.

Anyway, it’s a moment for the rest of the fashion world to look at what they’re yearning for when worshiping at the foot of McQueen. Few people remember, or take the time to learn, that McQueen’s shows in their time were highly controversial, often condemned by the press. His low-rise jeans, a phenomenon McQueen invented, plus collections now considered classics, such as his Givenchy debut and his Highland Rape collection, found few defenders. You couldn’t write about him without admitting the controversy: Robin Givhan, The Washington Post’s longtime fashion critic, described his clothes as having a “bawdy, sometimes mean-spirited attitude,” especially toward women, and even when praising collections noted retailers’ troubles with the fit of his clothes.

Rather than look to prop up the McQueen fantasia of yore, McGirr would do well to turn away from the green light across the water and build his own future — looking to McQueen for his bluntness and his inability to compromise.