Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  McQueen’s time at the company – which would soon implode due to a breakdown in the relationship between Gigli and Carla Sozzani – was short-lived and he left in the summer of 1990. Lee told Carmen that he did not know what he would do next, but said that he would return to London where he hoped to get work and gave her his mother’s contact details in case she wanted to get in touch. She was left with the strange and beautiful drawings Lee had given her and a couple of photographs. One of the Polaroids which remains in her possession is a close-up of Lee in which he looks disfigured, as if he had taken a scalpel to the surface of the image in order to scratch out his features.

  On the surface it looked as though McQueen’s life was going nowhere. He returned to London, moved back into his parents’ house on Biggerstaff Road, and started to work for John McKitterick again. McKitterick had left Red or Dead and had launched a label under his own name. McKitterick’s vision at this time was inspired by fetish wear and McQueen worked on a number of designs made from leather and PVC, with lots of zips and detailing featuring rivets. ‘At this point he really started to pick my brains again about the design process,’ remembers McKitterick. ‘He had had experience on Savile Row, but as an apprentice tailor, and then as a part-time pattern cutter, a “seamstress”, which is not a great CV to give him much confidence. He was saying now that he definitely wanted to be a designer and I told him that he had to learn the process. I said he could learn it by working with someone else, but the best way was to go to school.’ McKitterick told Lee about Central St Martins, the London art and fashion school that was then situated on Charing Cross Road on the edge of Soho, and talked to him about how he had studied for both his BA and his MA there. ‘I told him it wasn’t too late for him to do this and that his experience in industry would be counted as the equivalent of a BA,’ he said. McKitterick, who was at this point teaching on the MA course, gave Lee the name and telephone number of Bobby Hillson, who was the founder and director of the MA course.

  Lee knew that, if he secured a place at St Martins, his life would change. ‘I wanted to learn everything, everything, give me everything,’ he said.72

  Chapter Three

  ‘If you were a misfit and you hadn’t fitted in anywhere, then art school was the place where you could feel at home’

  Professor Louise Wilson

  Carrying an armful of clothes, Lee made his way down the long, rather shabby corridor towards the office of Bobby Hillson. He knocked on the door and waited. Bobby, described by one fashion writer as ‘patrician’ and ‘old-school’, opened the door to see a young man she thought must be a messenger.1

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked. ‘Who are you here to see?’

  ‘You,’ Lee replied.

  ‘But I don’t have an appointment with anyone.’

  Lee told Hillson about John McKitterick’s suggestion that he call in to see her. Bobby, who was in a hurry, said that he could come into her office but that she had only five minutes to spare. Lee dumped the jackets down on a sofa and told Hillson, ‘I cut these clothes, I was working as a cutter for Romeo Gigli so I thought I could come here and be a cutter for you.’ Bobby dismissed that idea in her head – he was, she reasoned, much too young to be a pattern cutter and her students would not take him seriously – but she was intrigued by his experience not only at Gigli, but on Savile Row.

  ‘Have you ever designed or drawn anything?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve drawn all my life,’ Lee said.2

  Bobby made an appointment for McQueen to come back in a few days’ time with his portfolio of drawings. When she saw his sketches – which she later described as ‘sublime’3 – Hillson immediately offered him a place on the MA course, despite the fact that he did not have the requisite qualification of a first or upper-second BA degree in fashion design, knitwear or printed textiles. ‘He was stunned, absolutely stunned,’ said Bobby. She told him that she couldn’t offer him a bursary – all the grants had been assigned – but if he could find the fees then she would love to give him a place. ‘There is no doubt I thought there was talent,’ she said. ‘He was relatively charmless, had nothing really going for him, but I thought if he cares this much he’s got to be given a chance.’ Hillson sent him to see Jane Rapley, then dean of fashion and textiles, and told her, ‘Jane, I’ve taken somebody; he’s got none of the right qualifications, he’ll probably leave in the middle, but I’m taking him.’4

  Later, McQueen described Bobby Hillson as being ‘like a mother’ to him, ‘nagging, but much needed’, and one fashion writer said the couple ‘made as unlikely a pair as a grand duchess and a football hooligan’. After training at St Martins, where she studied under the legendary Muriel Pemberton, Hillson had worked as a fashion illustrator for Vogue. Steeped in fashion history, she remembers attending Chanel’s comeback show in the 1950s. ‘That’ll date me . . . Everybody went to those shows, from Marlene Dietrich to Barbra Streisand,’ she said.5 During her time at the college she mentored the best and the brightest of British talent – Stephen Jones, John Galliano, Rifat Özbek, John Flett and Sonja Nuttall. ‘The MA course is completely different to any other course,’ said Bobby. ‘The concept behind it was to make the students work together as a team, like in the industry. So it is part fashion design, part print design. I wasn’t interested in it being a purely academic exercise, the whole point of the course was to make the students more professional.’6

  Lee returned home excited at the prospect of studying at St Martins, but also certain that his family would never be able to amass enough money for the fees, which then stood at £1,985 a year. The solution came from his aunt, Renee Holland, who had come into a small inheritance after the death of her father, Samuel McQueen, in 1986. ‘Renee used to work in the rag trade, as a seamstress in the East End,’ said Janet, Lee’s sister. ‘She was very aware of Lee’s ability in the early days. She spotted it early and I think Lee made Renee a couple of dresses and she was over the moon with these. She knew that he could cut, she was pleased with how the material hung, how it fitted the body. So with Renee’s help Lee was able to enrol on the course.’7

  When Lee started at St Martins in October 1990 he felt, perhaps for the first time, a sense of belonging. ‘What I really liked was the freedom of expression and being surrounded by like-minded people,’ he later said. ‘It was an exciting period for me because it showed me there were other people out there like me.’8 Louise Wilson, who would take over from Bobby Hillson as director of the MA fashion course, said, ‘That was the beautiful thing about art school. If you were a misfit and you hadn’t fitted in anywhere, then art school was the place where you could feel at home.’ Wilson remembered the St Martins building at 107 Charing Cross Road with a certain fondness. ‘If you were trying to describe it you would say it would be like arriving at a disused hospital in Russia,’ she said. ‘It was like walking into the best broken-down warehouse that had not been revamped. There were windows that didn’t work, the floor was cracked red lino, and the studio had four pattern tables that were really just slabs of wood on top of old chests of drawers, tables that were too low and gave you a horrible back. And yet it was fabulous.’9

  Central St Martins – which was formed in 1989 after the merger of the Central School of Art and Design, founded in 1896, and St Martins School of Art, founded in 1854 – had developed a reputation for fostering a spirit of cultural radicalism. Former graduates included Lucian Freud, John Hurt, Sir Peter Blake, Gerald Scarfe, Antony Gormley, Mike Leigh, Jarvis Cocker, P. J. Harvey and, members of the Clash. Famously, in November 1975, the Sex Pistols played their first gig in the bar (one-time bassist Glen Matlock studied art at the college). Experimentation was not only encouraged, but expected. ‘If you can draw it you can make it,’ said Muriel Pemberton. ‘Nothing is impossible, you just have to find the way to do it.’10 John Galliano, who had graduated from St Martins in 1984, later told fashion journalist Hamish Bowles, ‘You could move among the sculptors, the fine artists, the graphic designers and th
e film-makers.’11 Students congregated at Dave’s coffee bar, a dingy room on the ground floor filled with grubby Formica tables and battered sofas. On the sixth floor – the home of the fine art department – there was a shower block that became notorious as a gay cruising ground. ‘There were boys on my course who ran a rent-boy business from Soho,’ said Louise Wilson, ‘and they would bring back their clients to the showers.’12

  On Lee’s first day at the college he bonded with fellow student Simon Ungless. The young men, together with the other MA students, were in the studio on the second floor taking part in a group critique. Each student had to display work they had previously made and, in front of the other tutors on the course, had to explain why they had designed their pieces and who their ideal customer was. Simon, who had created a series of prints featuring tartan, outlined his vision and Lee, obviously drawn by the patterns of the various clans, asked him how he had achieved the look.

  ‘I thought this kid was really young, like fourteen or fifteen, and that he was the child of one of the tutors,’ said Simon. ‘He was wearing huge, disgustingly grubby denim flares and a dirty-looking vintage baseball T-shirt with a native American head on the chest. He didn’t look like all the others who were trying hard to look like fashion students at St Martins. I must admit I was a bit dismissive of this kid asking me how I’d done my work. Anyway, we went through the critique and this one guy had done his fashion design project with these Barbie-like illustrations which were very cheesy. Bobby asked him who the customer was and he said, “Kylie Minogue”. This was before Kylie became cool and me and Lee both started laughing. Then Lee presented his work and it was then that I said to myself, “Oh God, he is a student”. He presented his drawings, which looked like they had been drawn with chicken’s feet dipped in ink, drawings of girls with no hair, pointy noses, really high turtle-necks covering their faces and I thought, “Wow, this is really kind of interesting.” From that day there was an instant rapport between us.’13

  The more they talked the more Lee and Simon realized they had a great deal in common. Like Lee, Simon was working-class and gay and had taken the trouble to gain experience within the fashion industry. There was, according to Ungless, a level of unsophistication on the course that surprised him. Whereas he and McQueen were able to bandy names such as Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang across the studio like a game of stylistic ping-pong, some of the other students seemed ignorant of the basics of fashion. Lee and Simon laughed at one of their contemporaries who insisted on pronouncing Versace’s name as ‘Versayz’.

  ‘From day one people either loved Lee or hated him,’ said Rebecca Barton, another student on the MA course. She remembers a day early on in the course when the students had to present a collection to the group. Lee had stood up and talked about how he had drawn inspiration from Eskimos – the clothes featured large coats with big hoods in white leather. ‘Then Lee hammered into everybody else, saying, “This is crap, you haven’t done this or that.” Some people were really upset by his behaviour and I think a lot of people found him quite difficult. But I thought he was lovely. We got on because we were both quite sarky, I think.’14

  Rebecca recalls how Lee would imitate one of their fellow students who would use the long corridor outside the MA studios as a catwalk. Apparently the boy would prance up and down the corridor in an affected way, and Lee ‘would walk up and down imitating him with his saggy trousers, bum hanging out, laughing’.15 One of Barton’s strongest memories of McQueen is the sound of his laugh – ‘he laughed a lot, and loudly, almost like a squeal,’ she said.16 Although Lee alienated some students with what they saw as his aggressive attitude, he was acutely sensitive to criticism himself. Fellow student Adele Clough remembers one occasion when, without thinking, she attacked him for a poster that he had made to advertise some college event. ‘It was really badly drawn, embarrassing and misspelt,’ she said. ‘I said to him, “If you don’t have pride in your work you will never get anywhere.” I realized I had gone too far because he said absolutely nothing. You know when someone looks at you and they’ve been told that too many times in their life.’17 Tony McQueen remembers the seriousness with which his brother took the course. He recalls one time when Lee had to finish a project which involved some beading work. McQueen enlisted his brothers and sisters to help thread the different-coloured beads in a particular order, but Tony made a mistake and Lee told him he had to start again. ‘Is this going to go anywhere, Lee?’ asked Tony. ‘Just shut up and do it,’ Lee replied.18

  Lee also became friends with Réva Mivasagar, a young gay man who is half-Indian, half-Chinese. Réva arrived at St Martins two weeks later than the other students and at first he found McQueen’s behaviour quite boorish and abrasive. Lee was sitting down in the studio and sketching using a lightbox when Réva approached him. Lee asked him where he was from and when Réva told him that he had been raised in Sydney, he started to ask a series of ‘really inane questions about being Australian, clichéd things about barbecues. And then it was like, “Don’t disturb me because I’m sketching.”’ The initial bond came through a love of fashion. ‘He disliked most designers, but he loved Helmut Lang, Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela.’ Réva recalls how Lee would buy cheap clothes from army surplus stores and then add a piece of gauze on the back and the trademark four white pick stitches in order to fool people into thinking he was wearing genuine Margiela.19 Réva liked Lee’s ‘creative energy, drive and the way he envisioned beauty’. Lee used to tell him that both of them were ‘misfits’ – ‘in truth I think it was more about the fact that we had so little in common with the other students in our year that we hung out together more through natural selection . . . Both Lee and I had a need to explore London, whether it be through gallery exhibitions, movies, theatre, museums and libraries or late-night venues and any form of alternative lifestyle. As design students what we had in common was that we were always looking for new forms of visual stimulation or eye candy to achieve that creative high.’20

  Louise Wilson, who moved from being a visiting tutor to director of the MA course during the eighteen months that Lee was at St Martins, remembered McQueen’s insatiable curiosity. One day, Geraldine Larkin, a former St Martins student, came into the college with some embroidered scarves and ‘Lee wandered over to look at all the embroideries, and asked her all about beading,’ said Louise. ‘That’s exactly what he was like – he would hoover up information.’ Louise, who developed a reputation for straight-talking toughness, recognized that Lee had a certain talent for cutting. There was nothing else particularly remarkable about him, she maintained. ‘But I remember that he was always in college, that he was somebody who made use of the pattern-cutting facilities. Lee was always around doing his thing.’21

  Sometimes, in the middle of talks by visiting designers or lecturers, Lee would interrupt and start to argue a point. Some students found this so uncomfortable that they went to Bobby Hillson to complain. ‘A little group, three or so students, found it embarrassing and they said to me, “Bobby, why did you take him?” And I said because I think he’s enormously talented and told them that I thought he would settle down. He was a really intelligent boy, just badly educated. He didn’t know how to behave, but that was what was interesting.’22 There were times, however, when McQueen’s street-savvy attitude paid off. Rebecca Barton remembers one occasion when a designer visited the college and asked the students to work on a particular project. ‘Lee refused to do it because he said this designer was just going to nick our ideas,’ she said. ‘He was really cynical, but you know what? I did this T-shirt with a red cross on it and it got nicked by that designer and sold everywhere. Lee said, “I told you that was going to happen, you are such a loser.”’

  As the course progressed, Rebecca and Lee spent more and more time together, mostly at her small flat in Westminster and then later at another flat in north London. The friends worked out a mutually beneficial scheme: Lee would cook for her (he made a delicious pasta bake, something
he’d picked up from his time in Italy) and in return, after she had gone to bed, she would make her video recorder available for him to watch gay porn. McQueen was still suffering from terrible gum disease and when Rebecca woke up she would find that Lee, who shared the bed, had bled all over her pillows. ‘When he talked he would spit blood,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t very attractive at that time; he was fat and spotty, he was having a lot of sex but none of it more than once with the same person. Sometimes he would go out cottaging all night and he would come back and tell me all the horrible details. He would go to Camden Lock and see someone and they would go down an alley and have sex. Everything he did was to excess.’ Once, the two went out clubbing, but Lee told Rebecca that she was a poor mover and that he couldn’t be seen on the same dance floor as her. ‘Lee had a good rhythm, but he was very frantic,’ she said.23

  Simon recalls his first night out with Lee. He had just spent a few weeks island-hopping with his boyfriend in Greece when he returned to London and realized how much he had missed McQueen. Simon called him up and the two young men went to Fruit Machine, the Wednesday night at the gay club Heaven, situated under Charing Cross station. ‘That was the first time we ever went out and we just had the best time,’ he said. ‘We both loved to dance and go out and be naughty and pick up boys and basically have a lot of fun.’ That night Simon remembers a handsome guy cruising around Lee – he watched as the man came over and spoke to his friend, before quickly disappearing. Simon asked Lee what had happened and he replied, ‘“I asked him if he’d got a big cock.” I said, “Lee, your first chat-up line can’t be, ‘Have you got a big cock?’” But he was laughing hysterically.’24

  With Réva, Lee would go to the London Apprentice, a rough pub-like club near Old Street, or various ‘leather clubs in the East End’.25 According to Réva there was ‘way, way, way too much clubbing . . . there was never a dive too desperate or sleazy for us to discover . . . He wanted to go anywhere that had an edge. There were so many different clubs that I can barely remember now. There was never anything like just a nice, normal disco.’26