Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  In New York, McQueen enjoyed some positive responses and initial good sales, but he was less than taken with the city itself. He could never imagine living there, he told Samantha Murray Greenway from Dazed & Confused magazine, which ran an interview with him in the September 1994 issue. ‘It’s such an air-brained city,’ he said. ‘The money system, their class system, it’s so blatant: power by wealth. There’s the homeless and there’s the rich, there’s no in between. Money buys everything. Money buys you stature.’

  He dreamt of taking time out to travel to Spain – ‘to some desolate place where there are no clocks’ – as he felt as though he was beginning to lose control of his life. He could think of nothing but the preparations for his new show, The Birds, scheduled for 9 October 1994. ‘It’s doing my head in,’ he said. ‘It’s getting to the point where I’m not doing it because I enjoy it but because it’s what’s expected. I’ve got a feeling I could lose grip altogether, but that’s why I work on my relationship with Jim [Andrew Groves] because hopefully he’s there to bring me out of that.’48

  McQueen enlisted Andrew to help work on the new collection – ‘only because he found out that I could sew,’ said Groves. It was always fascinating for him to watch Lee making clothes. Once, Andrew related a story to Lee: how, a few years earlier, he had met an American man through the personal ads of a gay magazine. The two met up and the American guy wrapped him in cling film. A few days after telling him this story Andrew and Lee were walking down Elizabeth Street when McQueen spotted a roll of clear plastic wrap. ‘Let’s make a dress out of this!’ Lee said.49 At the same time, McQueen realized that, if he wanted to continue to improve his image and bankability – he had just signed a distribution deal with Eo Bocci, one of the original backers of Ann Demeulemeester and Jean-Paul Gaultier – he would need to draft in other style professionals.

  One day that year Lee walked into a bead shop in Soho, London, and spotted the stylist Katy England. He had first seen her in 1991 when he had travelled with his St Martins friends to Paris to see the shows. ‘She was standing there in this secondhand nurse’s coat, very severe, perfect for that time,’ he said. ‘I thought she looked fantastic. I didn’t have the guts to go up to her, though. I thought she’d be too elitist.’ Within a few moments of talking to her this time he discovered that she was one of the least affected people he had ever met.

  ‘Are you Katy England?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘Will you style my next show?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, slightly taken aback, and perhaps even more amazed with herself for agreeing to work for him for nothing.50 ‘At first, my parents thought I was mad working for no money,’ she said later.51

  Katy England – who would later be known as McQueen’s ‘second opinion’52 and ‘the hippest woman in Britain’53 – initially considered herself to be something of an outsider in the insular world of fashion. Born in Warrington, Cheshire, in 1966, the daughter of a bank manager and a mother who worked in a GP surgery, she started to be fascinated by clothes at the age of ten. She loved dressing up in her sisters’ clothes and remembers as a girl ripping out the pages of Vogue. She was ‘interested in the power and confidence [clothes] can give you’, she said. ‘I found the way I felt completely different depending on what I was wearing really fascinating.’54 After graduating with an MA in fashion design from Manchester Polytechnic in 1988, she came to London and started work at Elle magazine, where she had secured an unpaid placement. ‘I came down to London and got interested in magazines and didn’t understand the fashion world,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even know about the people at St Martins and how difficult it was to get into things.’55 From Elle, England moved to You magazine, the Mail on Sunday’s women’s magazine, where she worked as a fashion assistant for four years. In fashion terms, England was positioned at the heart of the British mainstream; You magazine was extremely popular but it was far from cutting edge. England, however, believed this had its advantages. ‘It was very good for me because I was put through the ropes in quite a formal way,’ she said. ‘I think that’s really useful. Also, because it’s a weekly, I was thrown right in at the deep end.’56 From You, England started working for the Evening Standard, where she believed she started to forge her own, more experimental, style. Journalist Nick Foulkes, who at the time edited a section of the London newspaper, remembers that ‘the pictures she used to turn out were vaguely fetishistic and, I thought, slightly sinister. England, herself, though, never showed any of the self-regarding “attitude” so common among the priestesses of fashion.’57

  Using his finely tuned instinct, McQueen started to pick the team for The Birds collection, some of whom he would continue to work with over the course of his career. Fleet Bigwood, Simon Ungless and Andrew/Jimmy helped with the fabrics; Simon Costin was drafted in to design the set and supply some of the ‘jewellery’ (including neckbraces fashioned from jet and enamel and cockerel feathers); Val Garland, who had just arrived from Australia, was in charge of the make-up; Alister Mackie, a recent graduate from St Martins, helped Katy England with the styling; and Sam Gainsbury, who had studied fashion and textiles at Birmingham Polytechnic, was brought in as a freelance casting assistant.

  ‘In the run-up to the show, in the weeks before, it would be fun, fun, fun, but then two weeks before [the day] it was, “This is serious, I need to get on, I can’t speak,”’ remembers Trixie. ‘At the time a lot of the designers were taking diarrhoea pills, emetics. I am sure that is what Lee would do, as he seemed to lose a stone really quickly. And he was probably doing speed as well. Andrew would be up too, twenty-four hours a day, for a week before the show. If I saw them at this stage I would say, “Honey, you look fabulous, you’ve lost so much weight,” but they would be ratty because they had only had one hour’s sleep.’58

  The news, on 6 October 1994, that he had not won the coveted Young Designer of the Year award at the Lloyds Bank British Fashion Awards, did nothing to help lighten Lee’s mood. McQueen had already gone into print with an attack on the body that granted the awards, and so the failure to win could hardly have come as a surprise. ‘London gives me fuck all,’ he had said. ‘If they offered me Young Designer of the Year I’d throw a right tantrum – they haven’t given me shit.’59

  Inspired by the work of the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher, particularly his illustrations showing birds that transform into geometrical patterns, Lee shared his vision with Simon Ungless, who was enlisted to print the fabric for the new collection. Ungless, then working as a print technician at St Martins, helped himself to the material in the college’s fabric store. Yet, in the runup to the show, McQueen kept many preparations secret. For instance, Andrew Groves knew nothing of his intention to use Mr Pearl, the corsetier with an eighteen-inch corseted waist, as one of the models. ‘He liked the idea of surprising people,’ said Andrew. ‘It wasn’t just shock, it was about subverting expectations. Lee had this thing – it’s not about the clothes, he would say, it’s about the set and the theatre and the emotional spectacle.’60 Mr Pearl had first met McQueen at the club the Beautiful Bend in King’s Cross and had found him ‘amusing’. ‘He convinced me to model in his next show for £100, which in the end I never received,’ he said. ‘The show was chaotic and very late, everyone was freezing and I found the whole thing boring. In retrospect, I was pleased to have met him – he inspired many people, and this contribution to beauty is part of his legend, but he paid for it with his life. I think he was not a happy man.’61

  McQueen was becoming an expert at creating heightened levels of expectation around a show through a not-so-subtle manipulation of the media. Sometimes he would get a thrill from telling journalists elaborate stories that he had invented. Once, remembers Andrew Groves, he told a reporter how he had joined a travelling circus, but had got into trouble for shaving the bearded lady; her fresh-faced look meant that she could not work for three months. ‘He was very good at his own PR,’ said Alice Smith. ‘He said that Mi
chael Jackson and Karl Lagerfeld were coming to his show. At the time, we believed him, but a lot of that was complete fantasy.’62 As a result, the excitement surrounding The Birds had reached such a level of frenzy that when friends turned up at Bagley’s, a disused warehouse in King’s Cross, there were huge queues around the block. Luckily, Donald Urquhart only lived around the block and so he, together with Sheila Tequila, went back to his flat, enjoyed a few drinks and returned to Bagley’s wearing the pantomime cow costume. ‘We still had to wait for ages for the show to start, but at least we were warm in our fun fur,’ he said.63 Joyce McQueen sat proudly at the front; Lee’s dad, Ron, watched from the shadows at the back after arriving late.

  McQueen said he drew inspiration from Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds – in which the heroine played by Tippi Hedren gets attacked by a series of different birds – but in his catwalk show the women are more than mere passive victims. The models who strutted down the runway, a dirty warehouse floor painted with white road markings, were powerful Amazonian creatures. Some women had been fitted with white contact lenses, making them appear otherworldly, while others wore skirts so tight that they found it difficult to walk. The fabrics were printed with images of birds and tyre prints, symbols of freedom and roadkill. The tyreprint effect was achieved by the low-tech method of running a car tyre dipped in black paint over the bodies of the models backstage. ‘He had all our hair crimped, he called it “angel hair”,’ recalls Plum Sykes, who modelled in the show. ‘At the time I thought it was so bizarre, not pretty. But he was trying to get into a new genre, a new look.’64

  Hamish Bowles – who in 1993 had arranged to feature McQueen in the pages of American Vogue only for the designer to tell him that he didn’t ‘give a flying fuck’ for the magazine65 – called the show a ‘revelation’.66 Later, Bowles wrote, ‘It was, quite simply, astonishing and one of those electrifying moments when you realized that a designer had arrived possessed of the single-minded vision and passion and talent to challenge the paradigm. It seemed even then that fashion would never be the same again, and McQueen’s low-slung silhouette and savage imagination would come to define the decade.’67

  Amy Spindler of the New York Times said that ‘the jackets in the collection were nothing short of perfect’ but the influential fashion critic did have one reservation: while McQueen may have been the ‘most talked-about designer to be showing’ in London that year, she believed his restrictive skirts and his bumster trousers were essentially unwearable.68 McQueen was determined not to be sidetracked by the opinions or demands of fashion journalists. ‘I don’t want the press or anyone making me into something I’m not,’ he said. ‘Someone said John Galliano only does clothes for press, but that’s what the press made him and now they’re knocking him for it. I can see myself going that way as well if I don’t take control because my shows have been getting so much press, because they’re so different from what’s going on. But I want to see people wearing my clothes, not just a handful of fashion editors.’ In an ideal world, McQueen said, he would like to make just one beautiful jacket a week, but the demands of the market meant that he had to finish five. ‘I’ve got a feeling I might become a recluse one day,’ he said.69

  Stylist Seta Niland wondered to herself about the effect of her friend’s increasing success. As McQueen became more high profile – it was rumoured that the jacket worn by Mr Pearl in The Birds had been bought by Madonna – she felt as though she was being marginalized by some new arrivals in his team. ‘It was a battle for me to stay with him and I didn’t give it the fight I should have, perhaps,’ she said. ‘But Lee needed to be on that bandwagon. It was all rolling too fast and as more and more people jumped on to the bandwagon I had to ask myself, “Where was Lee?”70

  Chapter Six

  ‘I want heart attacks. I want ambulances’

  Lee McQueen

  On 24 November 1994, a Thursday evening, Lee took his seat next to Simon Ungless downstairs at the Freedom Café and waited for the act to start. To say that there was an air of expectation in the smoke-filled room would be an understatement. Lucian Freud, Marc Almond, Anthony Price, Björk, Jane and Louise Wilson, Cerith Wyn Evans, and some of the members of Blur and Suede were all in the audience, and countless numbers of record company scouts, journalists and fans had been turned away. Lee watched as the Venetian blinds that shielded the stage began to open, casting slivers of light into the darkness. McQueen was here to see Leigh Bowery, a man who made Lee’s own shows look tame and tasteful by comparison. ‘In this jaded age, when nobody gets shocked by anything any more, Leigh [Bowery] still managed to shock people in an intelligent way – in an original way,’ said John Richardson, the art historian and biographer of Picasso.1

  That night, Leigh Bowery, who was appearing with his band Minty, did not disappoint. After performing a song about Comme des Garçons, Bowery, dressed in an enormous yellow and black striped dress, began to feed his ‘baby’ – his real-life wife Nicola Bateman – who was attached to him by a harness. ‘I was released from my harness and Leigh continued to undress until he was naked,’ remembers Nicola. ‘I had to say, “Feed me,” and then Leigh vomited into my mouth. I had to say, “Feed me,” again and then Leigh did a pee in a cup which I drank.’2 Watching from the side of the stage, and taking photographs of both the event and the audience, was photographer A. M. Hanson, who had first met Lee in 1993 in Comptons. ‘I didn’t know Lee was there that night – it was so dark – and it wasn’t until the next day when I got the photos back that I saw him sitting there in the front row, his eyes agog at what he had just seen,’ said Hanson. ‘Later he told me that he loved Bowery’s shows for their unpredictability.’3

  ‘Leigh Bowery was a huge influence on him,’ said Réva, Lee’s friend from St Martins. According to Stephen Brogan – who, as Stella Stein, was one of the members, with Leigh, of the band Raw Sewage – McQueen ‘worshipped’ Bowery. Leigh and Lee shared a mutual friend, Wayne, and according to Stephen, ‘McQueen pumped him for stories of Bowery and he was obsessed over his designs.’4 McQueen borrowed many elements of Bowery’s style and incorporated them into his work: the bumsters, the make-up from the Horn of Plenty show (Autumn/Winter 2009) and the ten-inch-high ‘armadillo’ shoes made famous by Lady Gaga. Leigh had worked with a number of McQueen’s friends and associates, including Donald Urquhart and Mr Pearl, who would transform himself into a ‘human bustle, doubled over beneath the fabric at Bowery’s back end’.5 Bowery and Pearl – both of whom, like Lee, were interested in transforming the shape of the human body through costume – adored getting their hands on a piece of couture and ripping the lining out of the jacket to see how it had been engineered, a process that McQueen would have savoured too. Although Lee and Leigh both used fashion as a form of catharsis – the extremities they expressed on the catwalk or in the nightclub reflected their own fears and desires – the ways they chose to do this were very different. McQueen projected his feelings and fantasies on to the girls who walked down the runway, while Bowery used his own body as the canvas.

  Leigh Bowery, who had been born in 1961 in Sunshine, Australia, arrived in London in 1980 and had set about a process which one observer called the ‘total theatricalization of the self, using the night club as his stage’.6 Although he occasionally made clothes for friends – BillyBoy* bought a number of his designs, as did Boy George, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Al Pillay (as the transsexual diva Lanah Pellay) – he knew that he could never marry his taste with that of the masses. ‘Fashion is a business, first of all. You have to appeal to too many people,’ he said.7 As he explained in his diary in 1981, ‘I believe that fashion . . . STINKS. I think that firstly individuality is important, and that there should be no main rules for behaviour and appearance. Therefore I want to look as best as I can, through my means of individuality and expressiveness. I think that the clothes I am interested in are strictly the opposite to what’s in mass taste, and that there is a minority that like the same style as me.
’8 One of Bowery’s most infamous ‘looks’ was the one he described as the ‘Paki from Outer Space’, which made its first appearance in 1983. This involved covering his face with red, green or blue make-up decorated with gold writing and accessorized using items of cheap Asian jewellery that he had picked up in Brick Lane. ‘His next make-up look was to complement his new frilly designs, when he made stockings with frills at the top, pinnies and very detailed blouses covered in pockets, intricate collars and full sleeves,’ said his friend Sue Tilley. ‘The cutting was very unusual and lots of the garments had uneven sleeves and clever capes and flounces . . . If Leigh was feeling particularly daring he would wear this look without the frilly knickers so that his bottom was bare.’9 The bare-bottomed look made numerous appearances – on the catwalks of Japan when event producer Susanne Bartsch flew Bowery out there to show his designs; on the television show The Tube in 1984; and when the choreographer Michael Clark commissioned him to design a set of costumes, exquisitely tailored clothes described as ‘haute-couture surrealism’. ‘Dancers wore caps with little wiglets attached at the back, silver platform shoes, ruffled see-through aprons, loud briefs, knee socks, and stretchy knit tights with the ass missing,’ wrote Hilton Als in the New Yorker. ‘This was at least eight years before the English designer Alexander McQueen would come out with his “bumsters.”’10