Earlier that year, Mira had played Lee an LP of the soundtrack from the film The Hunger, Tony Scott’s arthouse vampire film starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. McQueen loved the music, both Bauhaus’s gothic rock song ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ and ‘The Flower Duet’ from Delibes’s opera Lakmé, and, after seeing the movie, named his next collection The Hunger. Mira noticed how the basement – which he still used as his studio – started to fill up with people: creative director Katy England, Sam Gainsbury, who Lee had appointed as producer of the show, Trino Verkade, who had the role of co-ordinator, and a number of other design assistants, including Ruti Danan and Sebastian Pons. Sebastian, from Majorca, a graduate of St Martins who had met McQueen through Simon Ungless and Lee Copperwheat, remembers his first day of work at the studio in Hoxton Square. ‘I went down to a horrible, dingy basement, nobody was there, just him and me,’ he said. ‘He had just bought a table from Ikea that was still in its box and our first job was to put this table together. In the afternoon we designed this thorn print. He told me he was crazy about thorns, “They really represent me, they represent who I am,” he said. ‘He said he wanted to break some rules and do something a bit shocking. He created this team of people around him to help him achieve that.’41
To model in the show, which was held in a tent at the Natural History Museum on 23 October, McQueen drafted in Tizer Bailey, and her boyfriend at the time Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69, a barechested Goldie (who ran a drum and bass night at the Blue Note, on the north side of Hoxton Square) and journalist Alix Sharkey. The clothes, many of which had been manufactured by MA Commerciale in Milan, incorporated plaster cast moulds. There were men’s shirts patterned with bloodied hands, slashed trousers and dresses, and a piece of transparent body armour inside of which squirmed a batch of worms. Models gave V-signs and single finger salutes while at the end of the show Lee, sporting a blond streak in the middle of his hair, dropped his green combat trousers and flashed his bum at the audience. Later he said, ‘I showed my bum to the press because I thought I was getting a very raw deal . . . I was on my own, I didn’t have a backer and I couldn’t do as much as the British Fashion Council wanted me to do, so I started doing silly things to fill in the gaps.’42
As he rushed backstage, he realized that perhaps his shock tactics had gone too far. ‘I was saying to myself, “I may as well write my obituary now,”’ he said. ‘No one was coming backstage apart from people from a few mad shops around the world.’43 Fashion editor Suzy Menkes recalls going backstage and seeing him ‘sobbing his heart out’. She put her arms around him and tried to reassure him that he still had a future in fashion. ‘He was tremendously overwrought,’ she said. ‘At that time he always cared so much, he really put his heart and soul into everything. I remember the first time I went to see him he told me he had been up all night because he had been working on a shoulder and he couldn’t get it right. He was effing and blinding and talking about Yves Saint Laurent shoulders. He was so passionate about it.’44
The press were far from kind. Iain R. Webb, writing in The Times, said that it was a shame that McQueen had allowed his ‘angry young man pose’ to dominate the show as it was obvious that the designer possessed some ‘unique cutting skills and fresh perspectives . . . If only it didn’t hurt so much to watch.’45 Colin McDowell of the Sunday Times outlined how there was a crisis in British fashion, believing that London lacked ‘a common core’; the majority of clothes on display during Fashion Week were tame and commercial and repetitive. He criticized both Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano, who had just won his third Designer of the Year award, for churning out fashions which were ‘part Gone with the Wind, part nineteenth-century Balmoral’. And while he congratulated McQueen for spearheading a much-needed spirit of originality, overall he found his collection immature and childish. ‘What McQueen has he shares with Man Ray and Magritte, the wit and awareness to take the present and catapult it into the future before anyone knows what he is up to,’ he continued. ‘That is where his strength lies. Frankly, most of his clothes this season were an ill-thought-out mess. Many of his ideas will need some years’ work if they are ever to become reality. And it matters not at all because he . . . understands that the new femininity is more about giving the finger than it is about mincing along in court shoes like a 1950s deb.’46
Although Lee later said that The Hunger marked ‘the end of the old, reckless McQueen’ this was, of course, far from the truth.47 According to friends he seemed just as irresponsible as ever. In the run-up to the show Lee had asked Simon Ungless to help him with the prints. McQueen told him that he could not afford to pay him very much, only £500, but Simon thought that it would be good for his career. ‘Some of them were really filthy,’ he said. ‘I think there was one about fisting that went into The Hunger.’ After the show Lee had to admit to his friend that he did not have the money to pay him, but presented him with a gift certificate for the fashion shop Browns for £1,000. ‘I thought I don’t really want this as there is nothing in Browns that I like, but he persuaded me,’ he said. ‘I was working at St Martins at the time and so we walked all the way across town to Browns. I picked out some Helmut Lang stuff and then when I got to the register suddenly all the doors locked and the alarms started to go off. Lee had already gone. It turned out that the gift certificate was stolen, and Lee had filled it out and signed it. I explained everything to them and they asked me who gave it to me and I told them. “Oh, Alexander McQueen, we don’t carry him, but we love him,” said the woman behind the counter. “Well, I fucking don’t, not right now,” I said. I walked back to St Martins and as I was crossing Old Compton Street I saw him slink down a side street, laughing his head off. When I told him what I had said in the shop he was so mad with me. “How could you do that?” he said. “I’ve got a name. I’ve got a reputation and you’re going to destroy me.” I said, “Well, I’ve got a job and I’ve got to live. Fuck you.” And then, of course, we started laughing about it.’48
This kind of behaviour was not unusual. Soon after leaving St Martins, Lee had tried to steal a couple of mannequins and was only stopped from doing so by a hawk-eyed Louise Wilson. Design journalist Liz Farrelly remembers the time when, in the summer of 1995, she had been trying to finish her book Wear Me: Fashion + Graphics Interaction at the studio of Silvia Gaspardo Moro and Angus Hyland in Wardour Street, a place that Lee used as an occasional workspace. Liz had called in a number of items of clothing featuring graphics and had left them in the studio in preparation for a forthcoming photo shoot. One Monday, she walked into the studio to find all the clothes had disappeared. ‘We couldn’t figure out what had happened, if there had been a break-in or what,’ she said. ‘We were stuffed – we were right up against the deadline, the photography was booked and there was nothing to snap. At some point Lee appeared, maybe the next day, really the worse for wear. He’d been off somewhere for the weekend. I walked into his room and saw his bag or case open on the floor and there, all screwed up and “club soiled”, were our T-shirts, which he’d just “borrowed”. I was livid, but Silvia stepped in, calmed us down, and I think she either suggested he wash them, or she did it. In an attempt to build bridges, he offered, or perhaps Silvia suggested, a peace token and he said I could have anything out of the cardboard box full of his designs in his room.’ Liz was not a great fan of the bumsters, but she considered a black lace frock coat, which she described as a ‘beautiful mix of crude and sophisticated’, made from a ‘stiff sort of lace’. But she found the cut across the back too narrow for her and so she declined, to her ‘very great annoyance later’.49
In November 1995, McQueen, together with fellow designers Joe Casely-Hayford, John Rocha and fashion historian Judith Watt, flew out to South Africa to judge the Smirnoff International Fashion Awards. On the first night in Sun City, Lee had his wallet stolen. After feeling angry, he resigned himself to the loss and told Joe that perhaps it had been taken by someone who needed the money more than he did. McQu
een managed to scrabble together a few coins which he then fed into a slot machine and promptly won £2,500. From there, the group moved on to Cape Town, where they judged the competition. Linda Björg Árnadóttir from Iceland recalls walking into the room with her work, a dress made out of transparent leather which was inspired by the parkas the Inuits made from the stomachs of seals. On seeing this McQueen became immediately animated. ‘What the hell is this made of?’ he asked. ‘And when I told him the story he was very impressed and just kept on talking,’ said Linda. ‘He looked like a skateboarder to me and I didn’t pay him a lot of attention at first. He seemed very nice and down to earth, but not very sophisticated.’ When Linda was named as the winner of the competition at the press conference some of journalists in the audience started to laugh. ‘There was some criticism about my clothes not being wearable and not being real fashion,’ said Linda. ‘I was a bit stressed out and he answered some of the questions that were meant for me and defended my work, saying that a competition like this should emphasize new ideas even though they weren’t ready for the market.’50
McQueen had always stood up for people who he perceived to be vulnerable. Janet, his sister, recalls a family party in the late 1970s when Lee, who was still a boy, spotted her mother-in-law from her first marriage – the mother of the man who abused him – standing alone in a corner. ‘She was a very small woman, timid, and he made a point of going up to her to make sure she was OK,’ she said. ‘That was Lee all over. He had a very soft heart and would always be drawn to the underdog.’51 In 1995, McQueen paid a visit to Battersea Dogs Home and returned home with a light brown-coloured mongrel that he named Minter, after the boxer Alan Minter. In addition to meaning something second-hand that was in mint condition – appropriate then for a pet from Battersea Dogs Home – the name also signified somebody who had acquired special skills. The root of the word had its origins in the Old English word ‘mynet’, which meant coin or money. This was ironic in Lee’s case. At the beginning of 1996, when he was still broke, Edward Enninful, then working for i-D magazine, asked him in an interview about the secret of his success. ‘You just wanna see my bank balance!’ he said. ‘If success is counted by pounds, I’m fucking unsuccessful. I’m a really bad businessman.’
Enninful, who would become a friend of McQueen’s, went on to ask him a series of personal questions. What would he take to a desert island? ‘Well, it wouldn’t be a sewing machine,’ he said. ‘A bottle of poppers, a vibrator and a ready supply of Coca-Cola.’ What did other designers think of him? ‘A slice and a dice of twisted lemon,’ he said. What did he think distinguished him from other designers? ‘I think when they sent that probe to Jupiter, they found me there,’ he replied. What was his idea of a good night out? ‘With a man called Charlie.’ What was his most embarrassing moment? ‘Being born,’ he said. And, lastly, was he a fashion victim? ‘No, a victim of the fashion industry,’ he said.52
Just after he gave this interview his luck changed when he got a backer. He signed a deal with Gibo, the Italian subsidiary of Onward Kashiyama of Japan, who also supported Paul Smith and Helmut Lang. Instead of having to put together a show on a shoestring McQueen now had a budget of £30,000. The increased investment in the label was immediately obvious. For his new collection Dante, McQueen sent out a glossy, expensively produced invitation, a full-colour gatefold with a pair of angels on the front and a black and white photograph of a close-up of a dog’s mouth inside. The fabrics too were more luxurious than anything he had used before. ‘We have developed a pure white fine cashmere and printed a black paisley pattern on it for a simple dress,’ he told Paula Reed of the Sunday Times. ‘A black lace dress has a flesh-coloured chiffon base, so it looks almost weightless, but sumptuous, too. A lavender silk jacket is fitted close to the body with sleeves cut in a spiral and slashed at the elbow. Much of the work is done by hand, which makes some of the pieces expensive, but also original. I think people want that now, they don’t want to look as though they bought their clothes in a thrift shop.’53
Instead of showing inside a functional but rather bland London Fashion Week tent as he had done for his last two shows, McQueen had managed to secure Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in Spitalfields as a venue. The idea for the collection grew out of a conversation Lee had had with Chris Bird, who he often teased for being a bookworm – ‘You’re always fucking reading these fancy poncey books, aren’t you?’ he would say. ‘I said, “You should call your collection Dante”, who he had never read,’ Chris said. Later, when Chris jokily challenged him that he had taken up his suggestion, McQueen looked a little ‘sheepish’.54 Simon Costin had recently given Lee an art catalogue of the work of Joel-Peter Witkin, the American photographer famous for his studies of hermaphrodites, corpses, dwarves, transsexuals and people with physical deformities. McQueen was entranced by the beauty with which Witkin – who when he was a child saw a girl get decapitated in a car accident outside his family home – shot these unsettling images and he was determined to reference the photographer in the show. He wanted to copy a Witkin self-portrait from 1984, in which he shot himself wearing a black eye mask that had a small crucifix that ran from between his eyebrows to just above his mouth. McQueen sent a fax to Witkin’s office outlining how he intended to use the same mask design in his show, but, according to Chris Bird, the fax he received back informed him that the artist refused to grant permission. ‘I think Lee sent a really shitty fax back saying, and I’m not even paraphrasing, “Fuck You,” and he proceeded to use it.’55
In an interview with Women’s Wear Daily McQueen stated that he had wanted to use Christ Church on Commercial Street because most of his relatives had been baptized and buried in the grounds in the nineteenth century; in fact most of his ancestors, on his father’s side at least, were interred in the less alluring setting of St Patrick’s Cemetery in Leytonstone. The truth of the matter was that he was drawn to Hawksmoor’s church because of its proximity to the Ten Bells Pub, associated with two of the victims of Jack the Ripper, and its rumoured associations with the occult. McQueen had told Mira Chai Hyde that he believed that Hawksmoor was a member of a secret society and ‘if you looked at London from the air it formed one point of a pentagram with the other churches he had built’. Before the show started the atmosphere was tense. ‘We were all very spooked out and weird things were happening, like a crucifix fell onto the ground,’ said Mira, who was in charge of men’s hair and grooming.56
On 1 March 1996, as the fashion crowd pushed their way into the church, a religious fanatic handed out pamphlets entitled ‘Homily Against excesse of Apparell [sic]’.57 The audience took their seats amidst apocryphal whispers of how victims of the Black Death had been buried beneath the floor of the church and how their ghosts still haunted the catacombs. Atonal music started to echo around the building and the stained-glass window of Jesus Christ at the back of the church seemed to blaze brighter for a moment before everything was pitched into darkness. The lights came on briefly before the audience was shrouded in blackness once more, an effect that produced gasps of astonishment. Then, from an archway of roses, a model wearing a Witkin-style black mask emerged wearing a beautifully tailored black dress with two reverse V-shaped slashes that revealed her breasts. Male models were styled as members of an American gang, men who seemed both attracted to and fearful of the powerful women who strutted down the cross-shaped catwalk. In fact, some of the women on display here looked as though they had transformed themselves into an unclassifiable third sex or a mutant hybrid of animal and human. Some wore antlers or unicorn horns on their heads, others sported masks that looked like something from Alien. One model had what appeared to be a crown of thorns circling her head; another, with spikes protruding from her pale face, seemed as though she had stepped from the set of the film Hellraiser. One outfit that drew the loudest applause from the audience was a black lace dress with an exaggerated mantilla headdress, supported by antlers, which increased the height of the woman wearing it to around eight feet
. The message was clear: these were women you wouldn’t want to mess with. ‘I like men to keep their distance from women,’ McQueen said. ‘I like men to be stunned by an entrance.’58
Counterpointing the organ and choral music was the sound of helicopters and the splatter of gunfire. T-shirts were printed with the faces of the victims of violent conflict. ‘The show’s theme was religion being the cause of war,’ said McQueen. ‘Fashion’s so irrelevant to life, but you can’t forget the world.’59 To hammer home his point some garments were emblazoned with images taken by Don McCullin, the war photographer. ‘When McCullin’s agent saw the images they not only wanted everything destroyed but they wanted to sue,’ said Simon Ungless, who helped McQueen with the prints. ‘Lee passed everything on to me as if it was 100 per cent my fault. We got around it – we destroyed everything apart from one T-shirt I have.’60
Yet, looking beyond the unconventional styling, the fashion critics could discern a set of exquisite clothes fashioned from grey wool, gold brocade, lavender silk taffeta and nude chiffon that women could wear, a sign that, at last, McQueen had matured. ‘In the past, the lewdness of Mr McQueen’s fantasies has limited the appeal of his inventive designs,’ wrote Amy Spindler in the New York Times. ‘This collection could be enjoyed by all.’61 Suzy Menkes, writing in the International Herald Tribune, said that McQueen had ‘hit a fashion moment’. Her review was called ‘The Macabre and the Poetic’, a phrase that summed up McQueen’s gothic sensibility and the beauty with which he had expressed it; the designer had even placed a skeleton in the front row. Menkes wrote how McQueen’s fascination with death mirrored that of contemporaries such as Damien Hirst – whose 1990 work A Thousand Years consisted of a series of glass cases containing maggots, flies and a rotting cow’s head – and the narrator of the film Trainspotting who says, ‘Choose life – but why would I want to do a thing like that?’ When Menkes questioned McQueen about the theme he replied, ‘It’s not so much about death, but the awareness that it is there.’ She concluded her review with the words, ‘[McQueen] proved that he is not just a fine tailor with a soaring imagination, but one of those rare designers who capture the spirit of the times.’62
Alexander McQueen Page 16