McQueen told journalists that he was responding to imagery from Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour, starring Catherine Deneuve as a housewife who spends her days as a prostitute while her doctor husband is at work. As he said to O’Flaherty, ‘I took the themes of the Buñuel film and made something ethereal, with long gowns; people who are cloistered and restricted but then all of a sudden they find a part of their life that’s been closed. There’s a lot of sexuality in there.’30
Plum Sykes thought that McQueen had also gained inspiration from the work of Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist whose paintings he had seen in the November 1992 issue of Vogue. (It is also likely that Lee went to see the Munch exhibition The Frieze of Life that ran at the National Gallery between November 1992 and February 1993.) ‘Alexander made the make-up artist paint all our cheeks brown so it looked as though we hadn’t had any food for about three and a half years,’ said Plum. ‘I couldn’t understand what he was doing – why did he want to make us look so ugly, why did I have to have my face painted like a skeleton or The Scream?’ The women – including one model who was heavily pregnant – had the word ‘McQueen’ stencilled in silver on their heads. ‘He did everything. He wasn’t sitting in state. He put the clothes on the girls, designed the make-up, designed the hair. I remember him backstage, screaming with squawking cockney laughter.’31
Lee’s twisted sense of humour was one of the things that first attracted fashion designer Andrew Groves to him when they met in the summer of 1994 in Comptons, the gay bar on Old Compton Street. ‘I seem to remember he was laughing at one of his own jokes hysterically,’ said Andrew, who was a year younger than Lee. They were introduced by mutual friend David Kappo, the fashion student who had been persuaded by Louise Wilson to leave behind the delights of the Soho wig shop to return to St Martins. Towards the end of the night, when everyone had had a lot to drink, the men in the group were passing around a joint, at which point they were spotted by a barman and threatened with being thrown out of the pub. Lee asked Andrew whether he would like to come back to his flat in Chadwell Heath. ‘I remember it was miles out, a train ride, and when you are that age everything seems like a bit of an adventure,’ said Andrew. ‘You’ve got no work so it’s not like you need to get up the next day. I just thought, “I’ll go and see what happens.”’ A relationship began and lasted, in fashion terms, ‘four seasons’, until the couple split in 1996. ‘He was exciting,’ said Andrew. ‘Lee was sort of my first proper relationship and I didn’t have a guide to what was normal or not normal. It was a bit like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – I just thought all that high drama and energy and fighting were part of being in a full-on relationship.’
There were many funny and tender moments, too. The pair enjoyed a holiday to south Wales, where they donned wetsuits and went surfing. Andrew and Lee would often go and visit Joyce McQueen in Biggerstaff Road. One day Andrew was there and, in a rather thoughtless way, said something was ‘shit’. Lee turned around and said, ‘Don’t you fucking swear in front of my fucking mother.’ Although Andrew tried to explain the irony of the situation, Lee did not find his comments funny.
Andrew, who designed under the name Jimmy Jumble, was keen for Lee to teach him everything he knew. McQueen, who at this point was selling a few chiffon dresses in Pellicano on South Molton Street – ‘the clients were women who dressed in Miyake and liked their arms covered,’ said Andrew – showed him how to pin-hem chiffon. ‘Underneath all that theatricality he was able to create really desirable and wearable clothing,’ said Groves. ‘It wasn’t just about doing the shock-value stuff that you saw on the runway.’
One day, soon after he first met Lee, Andrew returned to the flat he was renting with five others in Clapton Pond to discover that the building had been burgled. He also realized that the man upstairs was a drug dealer and had a stash of 200 Ecstasy pills. Perhaps it would be best to find somewhere else to live, he thought. At the same time, Isabella invited McQueen to move into the basement of 67 Elizabeth Street, which was owned by Detmar’s mother. The offer of a free place in a house in Belgravia might have sounded extraordinarily generous, but there was a reason why the building was empty. Numbers 69 and 71, both part of the Grosvenor Estate, had started to collapse and needed extensive refurbishment; the party wall to number 67 was cracked and the Blows had been instructed that it was unsafe to carry on living there. Despite the poor conditions – there was no hot water, the bare floorboards were covered in dust and dirt and they had only a dirty mattress to sleep on – Lee and Andrew were overjoyed that they could live together in central London. ‘In the front room there were boxes and boxes of Philip Treacy’s hats for Versace which we tried on,’ he said. ‘We thought how hilarious that these hats that had gone down the runway in Milan were actually shoved in a cardboard box in one of the dirtiest places I had ever been to.’32
Soon after meeting Andrew, Lee shaved his head and began to change his look. Simon Ungless, who was used to seeing him most days, recalls how at this time Lee seemed to disappear from his life for about three weeks. The next occasion he saw him he was going down the escalator at Tottenham Court Road tube station when a couple of skinheads pushed, past him; it took him a few seconds to realize that one of them was his friend Lee with his new boyfriend, Jimmy Jumble.
The couple’s social life was a wild one. Ad-Hoc manager Eric Rose remembers going to a party with them in the upstairs room of a pub in Islington Green. The men knocked back a series of free drinks and then Lee and Andrew ‘started throwing each other about’. Rose looked around the room at the horrified faces of the fellow guests and realized that they had crashed somebody’s party. ‘I was laughing so fucking hard I nearly pissed myself,’ said Eric. ‘It was like, “Who are these hyenas that have arrived?”’33
One day in Comptons, Eric introduced Lee to Dai Rees, who had studied ceramics at St Martins and the Royal College of Art. Rees, an artist and a course director at the London College of Fashion, remembers how he and a little group would congregate at the back of Comptons in an area they styled the ‘St Martins step’; no one who was not a part of their clique dared to venture near. ‘We were an odd, quite fierce group,’ he said. ‘My first impression was that Lee had a very strong link with his class, his background. We had a connection because we were both makers, a working-class trade, not screaming and shouting fashion, it was just something we did.’ When Dai was at the Royal College he would invite his friend over to the Art Bar on a Thursday night. ‘When we didn’t have any money we would go around stealing drinks,’ he said. ‘One trick we had was to wait until it was very busy and then at about ten thirty set the fire alarm off. Everyone would leave the building and we would fill up our glasses and stash them in the back of the toilet until we went back inside.’34
Eric also introduced Lee to Nicholas Townsend, also known by his drag name ‘Trixie’, who was then working at Ad-Hoc. To begin with, Trixie thought Lee was quite shy and innocent. Although there was only two years’ difference in their ages – Townsend was born in 1967 – Trixie assumed that Lee was much younger. ‘He had a very child-like quality to him,’ he said. ‘He had a young spirit. He wasn’t jaded or bitter.’ Trixie remembers one occasion when he and Lee were at Andrew Groves’s studio and they knew that Isabella was about to drop by. ‘For some reason we had this muslin body bag and, for a joke, we cut two holes in the arms. She came in and said, “I love this darling, I love it,” and when she walked out we laughed so much. Lee and her were like brother and sister, they were as crazy as each other.’
Lee would drop by Trixie’s flat in Covent Garden and, while Michael Nyman’s soundtrack to The Piano was playing in the background, he would listen to his new friend’s stories of going to Taboo and the Asylum Club in the eighties. ‘I used to call the eighties the “Haties”, which he thought was really funny,’ said Trixie. ‘I remember telling him I had met Ossie Clark, who had said, “You remind me of Bianca Jagger in Monte Carlo in 1976,” which Lee thought was hysteric
al.’ Lee regarded Trixie as something of a gay ‘mother’ or ‘older sister’, someone he could turn to for advice. ‘He was interested in the history of the AIDS epidemic, which I had lived through,’ he said. ‘He asked lots of questions about safe sex and situations you might end up in such as, when do you bring up the point about the condom?’ Although Lee didn’t talk about his own childhood he was interested to hear how Trixie had grown up in a children’s home and how, on arriving in London, he had worked as a male prostitute. Lee was also fascinated by Trixie’s style, the way he would mix items of male and female clothing. Some items in his wardrobe would come under particular close scrutiny, such as a copy of a Thierry Mugler suit. ‘He liked the tailoring of Mugler, but never Vivienne Westwood, who he thought was really tacky,’ he said.35 Trixie loved to dress in McQueen – ‘he was like McQueen’s muse,’ said Eric36 – and for his birthday Lee made him a pair of bumsters. On the day of the fitting Trixie had to strip down to a G-string and stand on a chair. When he wore them out he would always attract attention. ‘Even gay people found them shocking,’ said Trixie. ‘Some people giggled while others were angry. “Can’t you afford to finish those off?” gay men would shout at me. I don’t know what it was about those trousers because it wasn’t as though your whole arse was showing. I suppose it was the fact someone had the nerve to wear them. His clothes made me feel quite masculine. With the bumsters you had to stand quite tall, you had to hold yourself very upright.’37
Through Eric Rose and Trixie, McQueen met actress and filmmaker Paulita Sedgwick, descended from the ‘bluest of American bloodlines’ and the cousin of the actress and Warhol superstar Edie. Paulita, dressed in black Vivienne Westwood jeans, would invite a diverse range of people – her friends included ‘transvestites, tattooists and a sprinkling of ex-rent boys’ – to her flat in Whitehall Court, on London’s Embankment.38 As soon as she met Lee she became fascinated by his tough look and ‘authentic’ life experiences and she quickly cast him in two short films, On the Loose and Fit to Be. ‘She was looking for someone who was an East End thug, a gangster, and that’s precisely what she got from him,’ said Paulita’s friend Frank Franka.39 ‘One was filmed in Whitehall and the other in a studio warehouse at the back of Tottenham Court Road,’ said Trixie, who starred in them too. ‘Lee played a rapist, and raped one of my friends, who was cast as a model.’40 Later, Paulita would tell friends that she was disappointed in McQueen when he slimmed down and had his teeth fixed. Frank noted, ‘She thought that he was far more interesting before.’41
Trixie would often go clubbing with Lee and Andrew Groves. On one occasion in preparation for a night out at a club in Leicester Square, the friends decided that the boys should wear nothing but Gaffa tape. Lee and Andrew stripped naked and they fashioned a boob tube for Lee and a dress for Andrew. ‘I seem to recall Lee ripped the tape off Jimmy [Andrew Groves] on the way back and so he was naked outside Stringfellows in the street,’ said Trixie. ‘When we got back Lee had to rip the tape off his chest and it was really painful, but it was even worse for Jimmy because he had more hair.’42
One of the couple’s favourite clubs was the Beautiful Bend, a night held at Central Station, King’s Cross. It was a surreal vision dreamt up by the artist Donald Urquhart, drag queen Sheila Tequila and DJ Harvey. ‘We were bored of everywhere and wanted to get away from the whole branding thing that was making clubbing stagnate,’ said Urquhart. ‘We had an idea of a club that totally changed every time you went there. We put together different themes for each party and really went to town on the décor.’
Donald had first seen Lee’s work at his Café de Paris show, which he had attended with his friend Fiona Cartledge, who ran the shop Sign of the Times, and Sheila Tequila. ‘This was unlike anything I had seen on a catwalk,’ he recalls. ‘It was vaguely grim and not conventionally sexy, I thought some of the numbers were positively frumpy, but I was thrilled by the icy models – the cinematic drama was really something else. We went backstage after the show and there was Lee, wrecked, his little eyes vanishing into his head, with Isabella Blow taking all the photo calls like a prize fighter.’
Donald, born in Dumfries, Scotland, in 1963, had moved to London in 1984 and became a friend and collaborator of the performance artist Leigh Bowery. ‘I was everywhere in drag, day and night through the early nineties – at Tasty Tim’s Beyond, Powder Room at Heaven, Ron Storme’s Tudor Lodge, Kinky Gerlinky, Pushca. Of course when I say “drag” I don’t mean traditional sequins and feathers drag; I had something rather more sick yet sophisticated going on.’ Donald remembers how Lee and Andrew Groves would love to perform at the club in a pantomime cow suit. One night in 1994 Urquhart organized a night called ‘ArtBend: Paint Along With a Nancy’, which centred on several ‘jokey art installations’ and an Yves Klein-inspired ‘performance’ which featured Donald and Sheila in bathing costumes and covering each other in paint. At the same time, Lee and Andrew – inside the cow costume – staged a silent protest against Damien Hirst. ‘Of course, we all started falling over on the slippery paint for some cheap slapstick laughs, but I wasn’t laughing when the cow fell on top of us and I couldn’t get back up,’ said Donald. ‘I was under their dead-drunk bodies, pushing and wriggling, trying to get out from under them but they couldn’t move. It even crossed my mind that they were deliberately trying to suffocate me.’
Perhaps Donald was motivated to get his own back on his two friends when he invited them to a live broadcast at the Freedom Bar, the venue on Wardour Street opened by Roland Mouret, who is now a famous fashion designer. Urquhart regularly contributed short plays and sketches – ‘inspired by Round the Horne but rather more edgy and provocative’ – to the gay radio channel Freedom FM. One of the most popular skits was Pamela’s Party Planners, ‘in which someone calls an agency looking for outrageous drag queens and over-dressed nonentities to add some glamour to their party’. The character of Pamela had a sharp tongue and she regularly turned her cruel wit on the stars of London’s underground scene – her victims had included Leigh Bowery, Nicola Bateman, Princess Julia, Transformer and Matthew Glamorre. That night, in September 1994, as she spotted Lee and Jimmy lurking in the audience, Pamela decided to single them out for ridicule:
PAMELA: Who else do we have? Ah . . . you might want these two. They’re always really really drunk, teeth like tombstones, spitting bad breath and plaque at you and they misguidedly think they dress like East End barrow boys but really look like a couple of dirty Marys who just came off Hampstead Heath. If you’re lucky your guests might catch something off them.43
The performance captured the spirit of campness and bitchiness that seemed to have infected a certain section of the gay scene in London. ‘That was the mood of the time,’ said the artist BillyBoy*. ‘Lee could be really witty and sometimes cruel. When he was on the way up the ladder of drunkenness he was amazing. He would talk about feelings and art, that was a part of him that I loved, but unfortunately he had to climb the ladder of insobriety to be that person.’ According to BillyBoy* there were at least three different personalities trapped inside McQueen. ‘There was the sober him, an insecure, unhappy person,’ he said. ‘Then there was this intermediate one, this brilliant genius who was escaping with the aid of alcohol and drugs; and then this drunken jerk that went into a state of psychotic weirdness that I did not understand. Then he would be violent or morbid or sexed up and horny, and it was very unpleasant. He always used to talk about suicide. He would say horrifically scary things and at times I was worried about him. Suicide is a very touchy subject for me because of what happened in my family, but when he was drunk he would talk about it and he knew how much it disturbed me.’44
The fashion designer Miguel Adrover witnessed his friend’s quixotic personality at close quarters. He remembers Lee as both shy and insecure and ‘the most fun person I ever met on this fucking planet’. McQueen was ‘a joker, a super joker’ and someone ‘really dark’, a man who in the end no longer gained ‘pleasure from that da
rkness’. The two had first met in London in 1993 through Lee Copperwheat. Miguel, who had been born in Majorca but who was living in New York, immediately recognized a kindred spirit in Lee. Like McQueen, he grew up in a poor family – he didn’t have a television until he was fourteen years old – ‘and we had a connection somehow, we both came from the same place and both of us really needed to fight the world’.45
Adrover had told McQueen all about New York and in the spring of 1994 Lee got the chance to visit Manhattan for the first time. After the success of Nihilism and Banshee, Lee had been contacted by Derek Anderson, then the agent for Martin Margiela, and invited out to America. He put a show together in a downtown loft which was, according to journalist Ingrid Sischy writing in the New Yorker, ‘a frenzy of bodies, male and female, rushing in and out of remarkably intricate constructions that showed a remarkable amount of flesh’.46 In her feature Sischy examined the way that AIDS had influenced culture – ‘the fact that there’s been so much mourning, so much terror of sex, that people feel they have to break out. Some of the designers apparently felt the same thing.’ She fantasized about a time when ‘the wide range of desires that live in human beings might finally come out in public’ but doubted whether fashion had the capacity or power to express such feelings.47 The visions that sprang from McQueen’s mind over the course of the next fifteen or so years would do just that.
Alexander McQueen Page 13