That night, in November 1994, Bowery’s show proved too much for some spectators – Lucian Freud, who used Leigh as a model for some of his most revered paintings, found the noise levels too intense and had to leave early. The next day the Freedom Café received notice that if they carried on with the show they would have their licence revoked by Westminster Council. The show proved to be Bowery’s last performance – he died from an AIDS-related illness on 31 December 1994, a condition that he had kept from most of his friends. ‘A very definite line was drawn when Leigh Bowery died,’ said Donald Urquhart. ‘It was time to drop the acid-tongued severity and disposable decadence and respond to life with a new seriousness.’11
McQueen, however, was not quite ready to grow up. ‘My shows are about sex, drugs, and rock and roll,’ he said. ‘It’s for the excitement and the goose bumps . . . I want heart attacks. I want ambulances.’12 Lee still loved hanging out with Nicholas Townsend and listening to Trixie’s camp repartee. ‘Why do you always wear red lipstick?’ asked Lee. ‘Because it looks better on a cock,’ Trixie replied. Another of Trixie’s lines that used to make McQueen laugh was: ‘Heels always look better on shoulders than they do on the street.’ Lee liked to visit Trixie when he was working in a club called Burger, where he would dress up as a 1950s-style diner girl. ‘We liked to go out to Popstars, the Scala and Sean McLusky’s Fantasy Ashtray,’ said Trixie. ‘Jimmy and Lee loved dancing and at that time we did alcohol – snakebite – and speed. One of my favourite memories is dancing with Lee and Jimmy to Pulp’s “Common People” at Popstars. We were drinking pints of cider and just laughing. That was one of the best times we ever had. That’s how I prefer to remember him, as he still had that innocence then. We were like a little family, and we looked after one another. We might only have had ten quid each on us, but we made sure we got home and we were OK. The next day we all chipped in together to have breakfast.’13
Lee and Andrew often dropped in to see mutual friend Fiona Cartledge at her shop Sign of the Times in Covent Garden. The influential outlet began life in Kensington Market in 1989 when it sold rave gear. From there it expanded to a stand in Hyper Hyper and, because of the falling rents triggered by the recession, by December 1994 Fiona could afford to open a shop just off Neal Street. Fiona stocked a wide range of clothes by young designers, including Jimmy Jumble (Andrew Groves), and her shop became something of a mecca for stylists and fashion junkies such as BillyBoy*, who became a close friend. When Isabella Blow was preparing to shoot ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’ for Vogue she sourced many of the clothes from Sign of the Times. ‘And it was Isabella who took me to Lee’s show at the Bluebird Garage,’ recalls Fiona. ‘I didn’t meet him properly until after we had opened in Covent Garden when I noticed he seemed much more sophisticated than other designers, probably because he had worked in Italy. He was sure of where he was going.’ Fiona also organized club nights, using the profits to channel back into the shop, but by November 1996 lack of funds forced her to close. ‘When the shop shut I was dropped by lots of people, but McQueen never forgot me and continued to invite me to every show in London and he made sure I had a good seat. I never forgot that.’14
On New Year’s Eve 1994, Lee and Andrew went to a Sign of the Times party at the Hanover Grand in central London. The theme of the night was West Side Story and guests such as Liam Gallagher and Tricky enjoyed a range of acts such as Mark Moore, Harvey and Jon Pleased Wimmin. That night the artist Jeremy Deller took a photograph of the pair dancing, with Lee holding Andrew from behind. A couple of months later another photograph told a very different story. On Valentine’s Day 1995, Lee and Andrew went to Link Leisure’s Red Party in a warehouse in Bethnal Green, where they saw a performance by David Cabaret, a self-taught tailor whose act involved transforming himself into iconic art works such as Warhol’s Marilyn and Tretchikoff’s Green Lady. A photograph taken that night by another artist, A. M. Hanson, showed the couple leering into the camera, their eyes heavy with drink, their faces scratched, with Lee sticking a finger up to the world. ‘Lee told me that they had just had a fight,’ said Hanson. ‘I remember taking pictures of people dressed up in various pink outfits and rouged-up characters, then came across Lee and Jimmy in the corridor. I think Lee was being reactionary because of the fight they had had and Jimmy’s affection shows they had made it up, I guess.’15
Trixie remembers, in the spring of 1995, going to the newly opened Belgo Centraal restaurant in Covent Garden with Lee and a couple of other friends. ‘As soon as we went in we knew it wasn’t right for us,’ he said. ‘Lee wanted a burger and it was clear he didn’t like the idea of mussels. We ordered chips and we ended up having a food fight and we were asked to leave. Lee jokingly said, “Don’t you know who I am?” and they were like, “No, we don’t.”’16
This may have been surprising to McQueen given the controversy surrounding his March 1995 show Highland Rape, in which he sent women down the catwalk wearing tartan and lace dresses ripped at the chest to show their breasts. The newspapers accused him of misogyny, of using rape and violence as a form of entertainment and of featuring models with tampon strings attached to their skirts (the ‘tampon strings’ were, in fact, beautifully fashioned Albert fob chains made by Shaun Leane). ‘I remember the critics putting down their pads and paper during that show,’ said Detmar Blow.17 ‘I thought that he had gone a bit far and I think a lot of people thought that,’ said Vogue’s Anna Harvey.18
The Independent was fierce in its criticism: ‘The Emperor’s new clothes: rape victims staggering in dresses clawed at the breast were a sick joke, as were knitted dresses that M&S would make better for a fraction of the price. McQueen likes to shock. To admit to not liking his collection is to admit to being prudish. So, we admit it. He is a skilful tailor and a great showman, but why should models play abused victims? The show was an insult to women and to his talent.’19
The response infuriated McQueen, who appeared at the end of the show wearing black contact lenses. How could the critics not see what he was trying to achieve? The rape in the title of the show referred not to the rape of actual women, he said, but the rape of Scotland by the English. He was referencing both the Jacobite Rebellion and the Highland Clearances, and also the way in which Scotland had been portrayed by contemporary fashion designers. ‘It was actually anti the fake history of Vivienne Westwood,’ he told Colin McDowell. ‘She makes tartan lovely and romantic and tries to pretend that’s how it was. Well, eighteenth-century Scotland was not about beautiful women drifting across the moors in swathes of unmanageable chiffon. My show was anti that sort of romanticism. You needed only a little intelligence to take the clothes out of context and look and see how they were cut. I can’t compensate for lack of intelligence, but I wish people would try a bit harder.’20 Later, Westwood would issue her own barbed attack on McQueen – ‘His only usefulness is as a measure of zero talent,’ she said.21
Perhaps Westwood was thoughtful of the frenzied attention McQueen was beginning to attract. Before Highland Rape, which was held on 13 March 1995 in the British Fashion Council tent on the east lawn at the Natural History Museum, the show was already being talked about in terms reserved for sold-out rock concerts or over-subscribed theatrical events. Such was the hysteria surrounding the show that on the night some students tried to crawl under the tent to gain entry. Others, thought to be from St Martins, managed to get past security by flashing the photocopied invites of a close-up of some sutures stretched across a piece of skin.
Backstage, before the show, Joyce McQueen – who liked to make sandwiches for the models and crew – watched as her son attacked the dresses with a pair of shears. ‘There were all these beautiful blue lace dresses and he was hacking at them with his shears and I was crying, “No, don’t spoil them,”’ she said.22 John Boddy, a twenty-year-old student who had come to McQueen on a four-month-long work placement from St Martins, recalls being told by the designer to take a Stanley knife and a can of spray paint to a range of beautifully finishe
d dresses. ‘He had a certain kind of Jackson Pollock-like energy about him,’ said John, who had also worked as one of the dressers on The Birds show. ‘There was a sense of anarchy and chaos within that creation. I liked his oddness, there was something very magical about him. He was almost like a boy at times, but then he also had a wicked sense of humour and would say the most disgusting things. His laugh was like a cackle – at times you would think that there was a coven of witches in the room.’23
The tartan for Highland Rape had been paid for by Detmar Blow, who lent Lee £300 to buy it and never got the money back. The rest of the material came from Berwick Street market in Soho. ‘All the lace came from Barry’s stall there, mainly because both of us fancied Barry, he was an ex-boxer, and also because it was a pound a metre,’ said Andrew Groves. ‘So Lee ended up making a dress for a quid. The funny thing was the same dress was shot by Richard Avedon and was flown over [to New York] on Concorde. There was a seat for someone to take it and a seat for the dress. And it cost a quid. He loved the humour of that, that he could take a bit of crap and make it into something.’24
McQueen had worked on Highland Rape at his new studio in Clerkenwell Workshops, a space he began to rent after Detmar’s mother asked Lee and Andrew to leave her house in Elizabeth Street so that it could be renovated. The relationship between the two designers had started to become increasingly difficult and although Lee and Andrew put a deposit down on a rented flat in Hackney they never moved in because they had ‘a bust-up’. Soon afterwards, Lee moved into Andrew’s flat on Green Lanes, where he stayed for a few months. ‘It was horrible, it needed an electricity key for electricity, the bath was practically in a freezing cold outside lean-to, we had absolutely no money, and it was really depressing,’ said Andrew. ‘There were no chairs or furniture, only a mattress on the floor. And as we couldn’t afford heating we stayed in one room. Looking back, I can’t think of a worse place for either of us to be living. It certainly would have made anyone’s depression worse.’25 At times, Lee seemed uncommunicative and self-contained. ‘He kept lots of things secret,’ said Andrew. ‘There was lots of stuff going on in his life that he never really shared. For instance, I never knew where the money came from to do the shows. And then one day, around four o’clock in the afternoon, he said, “I’ve got to go to the fucking Palace now to see Princess Diana.” I said, “What?” And he just said, “Yeah.” He put on a dirty shirt inside out to see her.’26
Although Andrew Groves said he never saw Lee take drugs it soon became obvious to him that McQueen had started to experiment with them. The couple’s fights got nastier and more physical. ‘Once Lee came around and he had had a fight and had lost one of his teeth,’ said Trixie. “When he was going out with Andrew they used to fight a lot. He would come around and there would be scratches on his face.’27 Chris Bird said, ‘Andrew and Lee had a very violent relationship. There were punches, doors being ripped off.’28 Lee also started to frequent gay clubs in London with a harder, cruisier feel such as Trade and FF. ‘It was an experience, but one I don’t really want to repeat,’ he said in 1996. ‘The whole sex club scene turned out to be a really horrible time in my life. A time of total nervous destruction.’29
McQueen would stay out all night and return to the flat in Green Lanes at dawn. Once, he returned home and spotted a piece of paper with the numbers ‘362436’ scribbled on it, a sign – in his eyes at least – that Andrew had been unfaithful. Groves recalls, ‘He was going mad, saying, “Whose is this fucking phone number?” And I said, “That’s the measurements of the dummy – 36-24-36.” He was insanely jealous. He was always waiting for someone to betray him and to be proved right, that in the end all men were bastards and everyone was going to let you down or fuck you up.’30
In July 1995, just after John Galliano had been appointed the head of the Paris-based couture house Givenchy, McQueen met up for a drink with John McKitterick in a bar in the East End. Lee could not believe that Galliano – who after his graduation from St Martins had established his own label, based in Paris – would want to work for the corporate giant LVMH.
‘Why has he gone to work at this really boring place?’ said McQueen.
‘He needs the money to support his own business,’ replied John.
‘But why would he want to leave London, which is so great?
Why does he want to design for someone else?’
John tried to explain the economics of the decision, but Lee did not understand Galliano’s motivation. ‘At that point, Galliano was the only other designer he really spoke about,’ said McKitterick. ‘He felt that John was not the one to beat but the one to measure himself by. At this point, fashion was changing; it was the beginning of the trend of big fashion houses coming back into style and Galliano started that.’31
Ever since he had been a student at St Martins, McQueen had set himself up as a rival to Galliano. Fellow student Adele Clough remembers going to a Galliano sample sale with him where Lee declared everything to be ‘a load of rubbish’.32 ‘I never heard him say Galliano was brilliant,’ said Alice Smith. ‘But he never said Dior was brilliant. He had his own ways of thinking about fashion and that was all he knew.’33
In 1995, McQueen expressed some of these ideas in a debate held at the ICA in London when he appeared on a panel with designers Paul Smith and Helen Storey, the stylist Judy Blame and the design director of M&S, Brian Godbold. It was clear that McQueen, dressed in jeans and a simple blue shirt, felt angry about the state of the fashion industry in Britain. He told Sally Brampton, who was chairing the debate – entitled ‘Balancing Acts: Commerce Versus Creativity’ – that he sold only to one shop in the UK compared to fifteen shops in Japan. When it came to getting his clothes made he also had to look outside his home country. ‘It’s just ludicrous to think about trying to get a manufacturer to produce a sample from any of my collections,’ he said. ‘They don’t want to know.’ He also blamed fashion students for their lack of technical abilities. ‘It’s all very well being a fantastic designer on paper, but give it to a student to put together or construct or put the run through from paper to manufacturing – I would say three quarters of them don’t know what they are doing.’34
In the early summer of 1995, McQueen moved out of Andrew Groves’s flat in Green Lanes and into a basement loft in Geller House, 51 Hoxton Square. The area had not yet been touched by gentrification – there were no cool bars or restaurants and the only place to buy food, as Gregor Muir notes in his book Lucky Kunst, was a twenty-four-hour garage ‘that offered a very poor selection of sweets, fizzy drinks and crisps, as well as the occasional Scotch egg’.35 McQueen described the area as ‘desolate and rough’ but the benefit was ‘you got a lot of space for your money’.36
In addition to the low rents, McQueen had been attracted to Hoxton because of its association with the new breed of artists who had started to shock Britain – the so-called YBAs. In July 1993, Joshua Compston, who ran the art space Factual Nonsense at 44a Charlotte Road, Hoxton, had organized an event called ‘A Fete Worse Than Death’ at the junction of Rivington Street and Charlotte Road. Artist Gary Hume, who lived and worked in Hoxton Square, dressed as a Mexican bandit and sold shots of tequila; Tracey Emin read palms; Gillian Wearing dressed as a schoolgirl and walked up and down the street with a figure known as The Woman with Elongated Arms; and Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst disguised themselves as clowns and set up a stall selling paintings for one pound made from a spin machine, works that they would sign on the back. ‘For an extra 50p the artists would reveal their spot-painted bollocks, an elaboration on the part of their make-up artist for the day, Leigh Bowery,’ said Muir.37
Lee turned up at his new flat in Hoxton Square with one black bin bag full of his possessions. There was nothing in the loft apart from a makeshift shower and a small mattress on the floor; he shared a toilet, down the corridor, with his neighbours. On the day of his move he was coming into the building when he met Mira Chai Hyde, a hairdresser and men’s groomin
g artist from America, who lived on the first floor. She invited him into her loft for a cup of tea and within five minutes he had asked her whether she wanted to work on his next show. Their bond, she said, was instant. ‘I loved him immediately,’ she said. ‘You could tell straight away there was something special about him. He was very, very funny; he used to make me laugh a lot and he had an incredible energy. Everyone in the fashion industry had heard about Highland Rape, about this brilliant young man who had done this amazing show. From day one, I felt very bonded to him and loved him like a brother.’ Lee started to come up to Mira’s for dinner and then, after a month, he moved into the loft that she shared with her boyfriend Richard. ‘I have a picture from that time and you can see how poor we were because material covered crappy chairs, the bookcase was made out of wood and bricks and a curtain separated our two sleeping areas,’ said Mira. ‘For me to survive I had to cut hair, because I made no money in fashion. At the end of the day Lee would collect the hair from the floor and use it in the plastic labels in his clothes.’ Lee loved it when Mira cut his hair, which was incredibly fine, but he could not sit still for long. Once he asked her to cut a tramline into his hair in the form of a heart monitor that had flatlined, a symbol that he incorporated into his shows and an image that haunted him until his death.38
On Sunday 3 September 1995, after a night out, Lee turned up at Andrew’s flat in north London. ‘He came in, going “I’m in pain,” but I just said, “Oh, piss off, it’s because you’ve been on drugs,”’ said Andrew. ‘He said that he really was in pain, but I ignored him for about three hours and then called an ambulance. It turned out he had burst his appendix and he had to be rushed to hospital, to the Whittington in Archway.’39
When he came out of hospital Lee got straight back to work. Mira remembers occasions when late at night, after enjoying one of her suppers, McQueen would go back to his loft and start work on a jacket. ‘The next morning I would go down and it would be finished,’ she said. From the beginning, Lee started to give Mira clothes he had designed, including a green wool jacket embroidered with gold military braid and a pair of bumsters with ‘pee’ stains on the fabric, both from Highland Rape. ‘He had used bleach to get that effect,’ she said. ‘It was supposed to symbolize fear, the girls were so frightened they had peed their pants. I was called the bumster girl, because I was the one who always wore them. I wouldn’t have my ass hanging out in daylight, but in the evening I might do. Lee could tailor something to make you look like you had the most amazing ass in the world. His tailoring was exquisite. When I wore his clothes I felt powerful, strong, beautiful and quite sexy.’40
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