Alexander McQueen Read online

  Alexander McQueen

  Also by Andrew Wilson:

  Mad Girl’s Love Song:

  Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

  Shadow of the Titanic:

  The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived

  Harold Robbins:

  The Man Who Invented Sex

  Beautiful Shadow:

  A Life of Patricia Highsmith

  The Lying Tongue

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Wilson

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Andrew Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47113-178-3

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-179-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47113-181-3

  The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

  Endpapers copyright © Michael Adrover, Murray Arthur and the McQueen family

  Typeset in the UK by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Alexander McQueen Womenswear Collections 1992–2010

  Notes

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  On the morning of Monday 20 September 2010, the steps outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London were transformed into a catwalk. From a fleet of sleek black cars emerged a procession of beautiful women, ‘some in homage plumes, nearly all in raven black’.1 There was Kate Moss in a black leather dress and tuxedo jacket, revealing a sliver of sun-kissed cleavage (one writer called it a ‘staggeringly inappropriate amount of décolletage’2); Naomi Campbell wore a black feather jacket and a pair of studded boots with gilt heels; Sarah Jessica Parker arrived in a fairy-tale cream dress under a black coat; and Daphne Guinness sported a pair of twelve-inch platform black boots that, at one point as she walked down the paved approach, threatened to unsteady her. Together with 1,500 or so assembled guests, they had gathered at Sir Christopher Wren’s baroque church at the top of Ludgate Hill to celebrate the life of one of Britain’s most lauded and notorious fashion designers. Friends and family knew him as Lee, the rest of the world as Alexander McQueen, the so-called ‘bad boy of fashion’.3

  As they took their seats inside St Paul’s, an organist played Edward Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations. The choice of music, one of the fourteen variations on a hidden theme, was appropriate for the occasion. Elgar’s missing motif, what the composer described as ‘its dark saying’ because its ‘chief character is never on stage’, captured the strange contrariness of the event, a memorial for a man who was physically absent, but whose ghostly presence haunted every moment of the service.

  Indeed, McQueen himself was often described as an enigma. ‘L’Enfant terrible. Hooligan. Genius. Alexander McQueen’s life makes for an intriguing story,’ wrote one commentator after his death. ‘Few understood Britain’s most accomplished fashion designer, a sensitive visionary who reinvented fashion in so many ways.’4 The stylist Katy England, who worked with the designer and who attended the memorial with her husband, the pop star Bobby Gillespie, described McQueen as ‘quite a closed shop . . . he does isolate himself, he does cut himself off’,5 while Trino Verkade, a trusted member of McQueen’s staff, said that ‘Lee definitely became more introverted and, in the end, he could only handle being around very few people.’6 Although, one observer declared, McQueen would have loved the memorial service, which had, she said, ‘all the theatrical drama, raw human emotion, heritage, ecclesiastical splendour and beauty that characterized his catwalk shows’,7 the designer would have been unable to sit through the series of fulsome accolades and eulogies. He might have been, in his own words, ‘a big-mouth east London yob’8 and supremely confident of his abilities, but he was so fundamentally shy that at the end of each show he would only make the briefest of appearances on the catwalk before being whisked off home or to dinner with friends. ‘He would be amazed that he was held in such high esteem,’ said his sister Jacqui. ‘At the end he would think, “I’m just Lee.”’9

  The service, which began promptly at eleven o’clock – unlike so many McQueen shows that started behind schedule – opened with an address given by Reverend Canon Giles Fraser. ‘It was a life lived in the public gaze, but it was as vulnerable and retiring as it was glamorous,’ he said. Fraser, wearing one of the gold and white copes encrusted with Swarovski crystals that had been commissioned for the cathedral’s three-hundredth anniversary, spoke of McQueen’s achievements: how he was named British Designer of the Year four times between 1996 and 2003 and International Designer of the Year in 2003, and how that same year he was made a Commander of the British Empire. ‘We give thanks for his creative mind, his showmanship, and for his capacity to shock.’ Fraser also acknowledged McQueen’s strong commitment to friends, his love of animals (especially his three dogs which he left behind), and his ‘challenging nature’ – those who had been on the receiving end of his ‘sharp tongue’ must have smiled to themselves when they heard that. ‘When he needed support and solace, he found it in his family,’ added Fraser, ‘which is why, despite the dazzle of his world, he never forgot his East End roots and how much he owed to his loved ones.’10

  That day in the cathedral McQueen’s family sat apart from the celebrities and the models. Andrew Groves, one of McQueen’s former boyfriends, noticed that the designer’s taxi-driver father, Ronald, and his brothers and sisters, seemed distinctly uncomfortable. ‘They felt really out of place at that event,’ said Groves, who in the nineties worked as a fashion designer under the name Jimmy Jumble and who is now also a fashion tutor. ‘To me it felt as though they didn’t really understand Lee’s legacy. It was like, “what’s all this about?”’11 Alice Smith, a fashion recruitment consultant and a friend who met McQueen in 1992, was struck by the difference in footwear on the two sides of the aisle. ‘The memorial service was very odd, as I couldn’t reconcile the family with the fashion crowd. I kept looking at their shoes – the family had very normal high street shoes – and on the other side were these fantastically expensive, ostentatious shoes.’

  That contrast symbolized one of the paradoxes of McQueen’s life, a contradiction that the designer never fully resolved. ‘That was his problem,’ said Alice. ‘His family was well-behaved, they were nice people trying to live a good life and on the other side of his life was this completely bonkers world.’12 The atmosphere that day was awkward as the gu
ests consisted of a number of cliques and groups – the supermodels, the actresses, the famous designers, the East End family, the gay friends from Old Compton Street – none of whom knew one another. ‘It was a weird mixture of people there and no one was interacting,’ said Andrew Groves. ‘When you go to a fashion show everyone knows where they are meant to sit. If I go to a fashion show I know, as I’m in education, that I’ll be right on the back row, and I know that Anna [Wintour] will be on the front row. I know for that moment we are in the same world, but in reality we’re not.’13

  After the Lord’s Prayer, the congregation stood to sing ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, a hymn that includes two lines McQueen would have found especially poignant: ‘And there’s another country I’ve heard of long ago,/Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know.’ Throughout his life the designer was searching for ‘another country’ of his own. McQueen yearned for a place, a state, an idea, a man, a dress, a dream, a drug that would transform his reality. Yet if he was addicted to anything – Lee made no secret of his seemingly insatiable appetite for cocaine – ultimately he was addicted to the lure of fantasy, the prospect that one day he might be free of his body, his memories, his regrets, his past.

  It was clear that McQueen thought that love had the ultimate transformative power. ‘Of course, there is a dark side,’ said Katy England three years before her friend’s death. ‘But there is also a truly romantic side. Lee’s such a romantic character and he has these dreams. It’s all about him looking for love, isn’t it? It’s him looking for love and his idea of love and romance, well, it’s way above and beyond reality.’14

  On his upper right arm the designer had a tattoo of the words, spoken by Helena, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.’ The quotation is key to understanding both Lee McQueen the man and Alexander McQueen the superstar designer. As Andrew Bolton, curator of Savage Beauty, the Metropolitan Museum’s 2011 exhibition of McQueen’s work and the consultant curator of the V&A exhibition of the same name, stated, ‘In her contemplations, Helena believes that love has the power to transform something ugly into something beautiful, because love is propelled by subjective perceptions of the individual, not by objective assessments of appearance. This belief was not only shared by McQueen but also critical to his creativity.’15

  McQueen’s extraordinary talent as a designer was the subject of an address given by Anna Wintour. ‘He was a complex and gifted young man who, as a child, liked nothing more than watching the birds from the roof of [an] east London tower block,’ said the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, who was wearing a black and gold embroidered McQueen coat.16 ‘He has left us with an exceptional legacy, a talent that soared like the birds of his childhood above us all.’ During the course of his career, from his 1992 St Martins MA graduate show to his death in February 2010, McQueen had harnessed ‘his dreams and demons’. It was no surprise to learn that McQueen’s final collection, which the designer was working on at the time of his death and which Wintour described as a battle between ‘dark and light’, became unofficially known as Angels and Demons.17 Three years before his death, McQueen had told the French magazine Numéro, ‘I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil.’18 ‘Lee combined two things, the superficiality of fashion and the sublime beauty of death,’ said his friend Jake Chapman, the artist. ‘The reason his work has resonance was the self-destruction. We were watching someone kind of crumble.’19

  Despite the black spectre of depression that overshadowed his later years, McQueen had an unstoppable energy and zest for life. He was an unashamed hedonist – he adored both the finest caviar and a treat of beans and poached eggs on toast while sitting on the sofa watching Coronation Street. He loved Maker’s Mark and Diet Coke, the sleazier end of gay pornography and a great deal of anonymous sex. So it was fitting that at the memorial service, after Anna Wintour sat down, the composer Michael Nyman came forward to play ‘The Heart Asks Pleasure First’, from his score to Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano. The heroine of that film Ada McGrath (played by Holly Hunter) is a mute woman who has not spoken since she was six years old and expresses herself through playing the piano. Verbal articulacy was not McQueen’s strong point – ‘I saw him off his face at parties . . . he was completely incomprehensible, he didn’t know what he was saying,’ said the broadcaster and writer Janet Street-Porter20 – but his greatest eloquence could be found in the radical clothes he designed and the spectacular shows he staged. ‘What you see in the work is the person himself,’ McQueen once said. ‘And my heart is in my work.’21

  The jeweller Shaun Leane, whose address followed Nyman’s performance, and who worked with Lee on a number of collections, said, ‘I watched you grow, you broke the boundaries and succeeded.’ He spoke of how, on a recent trip to Africa, he had looked up at the sky and asked, ‘“Where are you, Lee?” As the words left my mouth a shooting star shot across the sky, you answered me. You moved stars like you moved our lives.’22 Leane also recalls his friend’s ‘dirty laugh, brave heart, memory like an elephant and bright blue eyes’.23

  When Leane retook his seat a collection was passed around the congregation to raise funds for the Terrence Higgins Trust, Battersea Dogs Cats Home and Blue Cross, all charities close to McQueen’s heart. The soulful voices of the London Community Gospel Choir echoed throughout the church. ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me!/I once was lost, but now am found;/Was blind, but now I see.’ McQueen’s grace, the thing that gave him hope – at least in the early days – was fashion. Alice Smith remembers Lee as a young graduate with too much time on his hands when he would haunt her office in St Martin’s Lane ‘and pick up Draper’s Record, which is quite a sombre [trade] publication, or at least it used to be, and he would flick through the pages going “Fashion! Fashion! Fashion!” We would say, “It’s not Italian Vogue.”’24

  After the gospel choir finished singing ‘Amazing Grace’, Suzy Menkes, then fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, took her turn and spoke of McQueen’s vision. ‘In thinking about the McQueen legacy, I remember his bravery, his daring and his imagination,’ she said. ‘But I keep coming back to the beauty: the streamlined elegance of his tailoring, the wispy lightness of printed chiffon, the weirdness of animal and vegetable patterns that showed a designer who cared about the planet, not just Planet Fashion.’ She recalls the first time she met Lee, then an angry and rather fat young man in his East End studio, ‘ankle deep in cuts of fabric, turning his scissors savagely into the cloth he was cutting’. Later, he transformed himself into a slimmer and altogether sleeker product and she remembers him ‘cackling with joy’ as the fashion editors rushed backstage to congratulate him after a truly exceptional show. ‘The imagination and showmanship never drowned out his flawless tailoring, nor the subtle fluidity he learnt during his period in Paris haute couture,’ she said. ‘I had no doubt – and nor did he – that he was an artist who just happened to work with clothing and whose shows were extraordinary vaults of the imagination. And above all, that his work was deeply personal.’

  Menkes, who had seen every McQueen show from the beginning of his career, related the last conversation she had had with the designer after his menswear show in Milan in January earlier that year. ‘But bones are beautiful!’ he had said, in an attempt to explain why the ‘tailored suits . . . wallpaper and flooring’ looked like something from an ossuary, ‘with artistic arrangements of everyone’s skeletal ending’. Of course, she should not have been surprised by this latest ‘riff on the macabre’, she said, as you could ‘trace harbingers of death and destruction through his extraordinary collections’. Before stepping down, Menkes went on to quote something McQueen had once told her about himself; interestingly the designer had already talked about himself in the past tense, as if he were already dead: ‘Anger in my work reflected angst in my personal life. What people see is me coming to terms with what I wa
s in life. It’s always about the human psyche. My work is like a biography of my own personality.’ Although Menkes urged the congregation to remember McQueen by the words from Keats’s poem, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Beauty is truth. Truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth – and all ye need to know’, it was difficult for friends and family to forget the manner in which the forty-year-old designer had died.25 On 11 February 2010, the day before his mother’s funeral, he had committed suicide at his flat in London’s Mayfair.

  Murray Arthur, who was Lee’s boyfriend between 1996 and 1998, felt an overwhelming sense of loss both when he heard the shocking news of McQueen’s death and during the memorial service itself. ‘I remember I couldn’t look down,’ he told me. ‘I had to keep looking up because I knew that if I looked down tears would come and I’d choke up.’26 Like many in the audience, he found the next performance, Björk’s live rendition of Billie Holliday’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’, particularly difficult to endure: ‘Gloomy Sunday, with shadows I spend it all./My heart and I have decided to end it all.’

  Dressed in a ‘feathery grey and brown skirt and a parchment set of wings’27 Björk looked like one of the hybrid creatures that so often haunted McQueen’s shows, a half-woman, half-bird, a wounded Ariel singing of the dark side of the creative imagination.

  The lyrics, which were originally written by Laszló Javor, and which became known as ‘the Hungarian suicide song’, stand both as a poetic distillation of McQueen’s inner torment and the sense of despair suffered by those he left behind; in the dark hinterland following McQueen’s death many close friends and some family members experienced suicidal thoughts. ‘Gloomy Sunday’ could also be seen as McQueen’s posthumous paean to his friend and early mentor Isabella Blow, who suffered from depression and who had killed herself by drinking weedkiller in May 2007. After Isabella’s death, McQueen became increasingly obsessed with the idea of trying to contact his friend beyond the grave and spent hundreds of pounds on mediums and psychics in an attempt to reach her. ‘Lee was obsessed with the afterlife,’ said Archie Reed, who first met Lee in 1989, and who became his boyfriend ten years later. ‘I got the impression that both Issie and him were rushing towards death.’28