OUR STORY

From one shop in east London to a school in Itaewon — thirty-five years of dressing rooms with flowers.

  1. 1991

    A shop on Great Eastern Street

    Kally Ellis leaves the marketing team of a French merchant bank and takes on a small flower shop in Shoreditch, east London. The aim is a plain one: simple, stylish flowers, beautifully presented. The premises had been a florist's before her, and it is from that shop that the company takes its name.

  2. 1990s

    Oscars night

    McQueens begins dressing the Vanity Fair party on Oscars night in Los Angeles — a commission it still holds more than twenty-five years later, and the beginning of a reputation built on rooms rather than bouquets.

  3. 1998

    The Flower School opens

    The school begins teaching in London — career courses, short courses and workshops — on the belief that the craft is worth passing on rather than guarding.

  4. The rooms we are asked into

    A dedicated McQueens counter inside Claridge's. The Champions' Ball at the All England Lawn Tennis Club. The London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. London's hotels, restaurants and boardrooms, week in and week out.

  5. 2018

    Korea, first as a pop-up

    After years of Korean florists travelling to London to study, the school comes to them: a pop-up in Seoul, taught to the London curriculum. It sells out, and settles the question of whether Korea wants a school of its own.

  6. 2019

    Cheongdam: the first international school

    McQueens opens its first flower school outside London, on Dosan-daero in Cheongdam, Seoul — among the houses the district is known for. Dong Min Kim leads the studio as Head Florist, and the London diploma's opening week can now be taken in Seoul.

  7. 2019

    The anemone

    A new identity gives the house a single mark: the anemone. One flower, drawn plainly, standing for the whole.

  8. 2025

    A school on the South Bank

    The London school moves into two floors on the South Bank, its largest home yet, in the middle of the city's creative quarter.

  9. TODAY

    Seoul, Itaewon

    Thirty-five years from a shop in Shoreditch: studios in London, New York and Seoul, and a school in Itaewon teaching the same craft to the same standard.