Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  On Tuesday, Katy wrote in her diary that Kate Moss had decided not to model for the show as she wanted to stay in New York and she noted that the clothes that were supposed to arrive that morning were still stuck at Heathrow. ‘Stella Tennant is due to arrive in five minutes for a fitting and we have nothing to put her in, except the show pieces Lee has made here,’ she wrote. That night, Katy did not sleep at all, because late on Tuesday Lee had ‘flipped and decided we couldn’t wait any longer for the clothes’. McQueen had shouted at Katy and made her cry, but later he bought her a diamond costing £400 as an apology. Katy hired a van and asked her boyfriend, the photographer Phil Poynter, to drive her over to Heathrow. They left at 10.30 p.m., but the clothes were not released until two in the morning, meaning that she did not get back to the studio until 4 a.m. On Wednesday it was manic, she wrote. ‘I styled sixty of the eighty women’s outfits before midday today,’ she noted. The make-up artist Topolino arrived from Paris and he tested the look on Catherine Brickhill. Katy also booked two male models at the last minute, including Maxim Reality from The Prodigy: ‘he’s the one with a row of silver teeth,’ she wrote. On the night before the show Katy only managed to snatch four hours’ sleep. ‘We’re running on coffee and cigarettes,’ she observed. ‘We are all feeling very stressed.’ By noon on the day of the show she still had not finished the running order and Lee was frantic doing the last fittings on the 100 outfits that would be featured in It’s a Jungle Out There. That afternoon the vans would arrive to take the clothes to the venue at London’s Borough Market.20

  Lee had chosen the market, just south of London Bridge, because of its unsettling atmosphere. ‘It’s nice to show them [the fashion crowd] the rough part of London and make them a bit scared and look over their shoulder once in a while,’ he said.21 McQueen and Simon Costin wanted to try and recreate a scene from the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars, starring Faye Dunaway, in which the heroine photographs a group of models against a backdrop of two burning cars. Costin scoured salvage yards for old cars and then proceeded to smash them up. The designer and art director also took inspiration for the set from a scene in Bonnie and Clyde, in which a barn is riddled with bullet holes, and replicated this by positioning lights behind forty-foot-high sheets of perforated corrugated iron. McQueen had recently secured sponsorship from American Express and, according to Costin, most of the money had to be spent on security. The set, which only had a series of black curtains to shield it from public view, had to be guarded twenty-four hours a day during construction.

  The show, which started nearly two hours late, was described by one observer as a ‘vision of urban chaos . . . both on and off the catwalk’. In the scrum of people trying to gain entry, students from Central St Martins managed to force their way into the venue and as one of them rushed towards the audience they kicked a fire pot towards one of the cars. ‘The audience screamed and clapped as a fire broke out in a van,’ said journalist Grace Bradberry.22 Little did the fashion crowd realize that the fire was not part of the spectacle. Simon Costin confessed that he nearly suffered an embolism as he prepared himself for the resulting inferno, but luckily a security guard spotted the fire and quickly dealt with it. ‘I’m always a bundle of nerves,’ said Lee’s mother, Joyce. ‘I think, “What am I going to see this time?”’23 She was not disappointed. Horns sprouted from the shoulders of a model and the head of a crocodile grew out of the back of a man’s coat. ‘I thought it was absolutely mad, absolutely mad – the horns in the back of the jacket sticking up!’24 McQueen himself was thrilled by the chaotic energy of the show, something which he said was particularly special to London. ‘This is where I come from, this is why people come to London,’ he said. ‘They don’t want to see shift dresses – they can go anywhere in the world to see that.’25

  However, there were some influential fashion commentators in the audience who were not so happy. ‘I came all the way from America and all I could see was the coiffeur,’ said André Leon Talley, then the European editor of Vanity Fair. ‘Someone – the sponsors or the British Fashion Council – should take control and do something about this.’26 Tamsin Blanchard of the Independent said that the show ‘fell flat on its face’, and Katherine Betts, American Vogue’s fashion news director who was writing a long profile on McQueen, was ‘patently underwhelmed’.27

  McQueen had dedicated It’s A Jungle Out There to his parents. Ron had recently been diagnosed with bowel cancer – ‘Things are a little difficult at the moment, but we keep our feet on the ground,’ said Joyce.28 Ron’s weight had dropped down to seven stone and after being admitted to hospital he had undergone surgery and chemotherapy. ‘He was a small man but such a fighter,’ said Janet. ‘And gradually he made a good recovery.’29

  After the London show McQueen had only twelve days to put the finishing touches to his first ready-to-wear collection for Givenchy. The show, held in La Halle aux Chevaux, the horsemeat market in Paris, with its floors that sloped to ‘drain the room’s cobblestones of blood’, had attracted a certain amount of hype even before it began.30 Fashion editors gossiped about how, during rehearsals, the loud music had driven the rats in the sewers wild and as a result the maintenance staff had had to seal the drains to stop them swarming out. ‘Bullshit,’ responded one American journalist on hearing this.31 ‘If that was true, Alexander McQueen would have opened the drains wider. He’d love rats running around.’

  The reviews were mostly positive – Colin McDowell, who had previously criticized McQueen, said that the collection, which showcased ‘the clothes of women on the rampage in the most uncompromisingly sexy kit imaginable’, was presented with ‘astonishing conviction and assurance’.32 Yet McQueen generated most column inches not for his new collection, but for an offhand comment he made during an interview with Newsweek magazine when he compared his critics to Nazis. ‘Hitler destroyed millions because he didn’t understand, that’s what a lot of people have done to me because they don’t understand what I do,’ he said. Carole Malone, writing in the Sunday Mirror, responded, ‘If he can’t find a way of dealing with the pressure of his job – it’s only fashion after all – he might very soon find himself being carted off the catwalk in a straitjacket (designer of course) with a one-way ticket to the funny farm.’33

  Murray realized that after all the hard work his boyfriend desperately needed a break. So Lee booked a holiday for them to Antigua. The couple flew first class to Barbados – they chatted to Paul Smith on the flight – and from there they travelled on to the Caribbean island. They hired a yacht and sailed around the blue waters and sandy beaches, but Murray became seasick. Lee read books on tropical fish and experienced the wonders of the sea on his first scuba-diving expedition. It seemed McQueen felt more at ease when free of his body. He had a deep affinity with animals and fish and could easily imagine what it was like not to be human. In one interview, he spoke of how he had once watched a television documentary fronted by Caryn Franklin in which she had sailed with a school of dolphins. ‘She was crying on camera,’ he said. ‘They took her on a boat in the North Sea and these dolphins started swimming beside [them] and she just burst out crying, saying, “I wish I wasn’t human, I don’t want to be here right now, I want to be under the water with these dolphins.” It makes me feel quite emotional.’34

  On the last day of the holiday, Murray forgot to put sunscreen on his feet. On the flight home his feet became so swollen that once he had taken his trainers off he couldn’t get them back on again. At the house in Coleman Fields, Lee tended to his boyfriend. ‘I had second-degree burns on my feet, and I had to roll off the bed and crawl to the bathroom,’ said Murray. ‘He was really good and looked after me. I think that was the time he bought this huge TV, which took up half the bedroom. He was so generous to me, very kind and thoughtful.’35

  In May 1997, Lee and his team travelled to Tokyo for the promotional launch of Givenchy’s ready-to-wear collection. In Japan, Murray took a number of backstage photographs including one showing Lee, now sp
orting a blond Mohican, with the models Helena Christensen and Carla Bruni (both wearing fantastical wigs). The photographer Anne Deniau had also been invited to Japan to follow McQueen and take a series of behind-the-scenes images. She remembers one day going up to his room at the hotel. ‘Can you play the piano?’ Lee asked her. She said she could not, but why had he asked? ‘Because I have this indecent suite, with a piano, it’s so stupid if you can’t play.’36 At this stage in his life, McQueen loathed displays of conspicuous consumption. He said one of the reasons why he would prefer not to dress Mouna Al-Ayoub, the former wife of the Saudi billionaire Nasser Al-Rashid and one of haute couture’s biggest spenders, was because of the way in which she flaunted her wealth. ‘Last season she sent me a huge bouquet of flowers with a note that said, “From a future client”. I should have written back, “I think not.”’ When he witnessed people boasting about how much money they had in the bank he felt angry. ‘There is no style in gloating about money,’ he said. ‘These silly cows who gloat about it in the press. It makes me quite sick.’37 Murray recalls one time when Lee’s friend Annabelle Neilson invited them to Caviar Kaspia, the upmarket restaurant in Mayfair. The bill for champagne and caviar for three people came to £1,200. ‘But we were both hungry and as soon as we came out Lee and I went to McDonald’s,’ said Murray.38

  There were friends, however, who were beginning to notice a change in McQueen. One night Trixie bumped into him and Shaun Leane in Comptons. Lee asked Trixie what he was doing in a tone of voice that implied that he should by now have secured some kind of serious position. ‘It was almost like he was very career-minded all of a sudden,’ said Trixie. ‘I thought he was questioning me, which was a bit rude. What had started out as fun had become a career for him. He changed as soon as he went to Givenchy – he became a little bit pretentious. He also told me that Givenchy had told him that they didn’t want him hanging out with certain types of people in Paris. I think that’s why he couldn’t wait to get back to London because in London he could do that. He told me he didn’t like Paris, but he knew that he had to do the job.’39 Lee Copperwheat observed how fame began to change his friend’s character. ‘When he got the fame he really began to struggle,’ he said. ‘He was around a lot of people who would do anything he said, which corrupted him a little. He would cause trouble and drama and really you had to question whether, on occasions, he really was your friend at all.’40

  McQueen’s love of cocaine had also begun to intensify. By the mid-nineties, the drug in London’s media, fashion and banking circles had become so widespread that its use had become normalized. ‘It’s a post-rave, post-ecstasy culture,’ said Loaded editor James Brown at the time. ‘The toilet is the new boardroom. The toilet is the golf course where the deals get done.’41 ‘It wasn’t just Lee, everyone was doing it,’ said Simon Costin, talking about cocaine. ‘It was rife. It was like someone having a cup of tea in the fashion industry. It was not unusual or shocking or surprising. But obviously I think if you’re under that much pressure then yes, it does serve a purpose, it keeps you going.’42 Eric Lanuit, the press officer at Givenchy at the time, admitted to supplying McQueen with drugs. Lee ‘would call to ask for certain “vitamin substances” to help him stay up all night and through the day of a fashion show,’ he said. ‘I’m not talking about Vitamin C, I am talking about cocaine.’43 Alice Smith remembers going to a party at Annabelle Neilson’s London flat in Notting Hill with Lee and being alarmed by the effect the drug-taking had on him. ‘He had taken a lot of cocaine already and Goldie was there with him in the loo,’ she said. ‘At the party he was straight-faced, not laughing, not enjoying himself. I went up to him and asked him if he was OK and he said he was fine, but he was really dismissive.’44

  That June, while in New York shooting the Givenchy fall ad campaign with Richard Avedon, McQueen heard rumours circulating within the fashion world that the couture house might sack him if he failed to deliver with his next collection. ‘I don’t give a fuck, to be honest,’ he told Katherine Betts from American Vogue. ‘If they want to fire me, go ahead. Everybody knows that couture doesn’t sell. I’m an intelligent designer. I know what I’m doing, for fuck’s sake.’ Although he pretended not to care, Betts noticed tears beginning to well up in the designer’s pale-blue eyes. ‘If they fire me from Givenchy, I can go back to London and get on with it. But I take offence for the people who work in the ateliers. Every day they’re asking me, “Are you gonna stay? Are you gonna stay?” And they want me to stay because otherwise they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. If I leave they don’t have a job or a pension or a fucking summer vacation!’45

  When the Sunday Times ran a news story on 6 July 1997 headlined ‘McQueen Chills Blood of the Fashion World’, it seemed to many that McQueen might not have any choice in the matter. The newspaper alleged that the designer was under police investigation for using human body parts in his Givenchy collection Eclect Dissect to be presented at L’Université Paris Descartes medical school the next day. John Harlow, the arts correspondent, reported how McQueen had allegedly sewn ‘human bones, teeth and other body parts into his new clothes’ and quoted one fashion insider as saying, ‘McQueen has gone too far – this is disgusting, uncivilized and rather juvenile.’ Harlow also wrote how Givenchy had moved the clothes to a secret location in order to shield them from photographers and also out of the reach of the local gendarmerie.46 When Sibylle de Saint Phalle, the public relations executive at Givenchy, saw the story she became concerned at how it would affect McQueen. ‘He’s so sensitive, this is really going to throw him off,’ she said. However, when she managed to contact the designer by phone McQueen was surprisingly unperturbed. ‘What a bunch of crap,’ he said, a neat summary of the baseless story for which the Sunday Times had to issue an apology. However, his reaction made Katherine Betts, who was shadowing him at the time, suspect that the story could have been a plant by his own office. ‘For all of his contempt for the press, McQueen knows how to grab headlines,’ she said.47 Isabella Blow, herself a mistress of the dark art of public relations, could not agree more; in fact, McQueen’s headline-grabbing antics had, she suggested, saved Givenchy. ‘I think he’s already done a lot with the house because Givenchy has already had a lot of press,’ she said. ‘It’s like, as Alexander says himself, taking a dinosaur out of the sea and I think in one season he’s done that.’48

  In 1997, McQueen admitted how he had deliberately courted press attention by staging shows designed to shock. Referring back to his Taxi Driver collection in the Ritz in 1993 he talked about how one of his fellow designers ‘was sitting there and taking the piss because he was taking orders and I wasn’t – but he didn’t realize that I had been in the game for so long and I knew what I was doing,’ he said. ‘I’d worked with Koji [Tatsuno] and seen how he had gone under, and I figured out that the way to get the best backers in the world, who are Italian, is to get the press and the identity first. Then you get the backer. Anyway, who’s the one now earning half a million a year and who’s the one who’s still living in a dingy grotto?’49

  Eclect Dissect was based around the idea of a Victorian doctor, an anatomist, who travels the world collecting the most beautiful women. After killing his victims he dismembers them in the laboratory and then reassembles them to form unsettling hybrids, figures which then come back to life to haunt their creator. ‘What you were seeing were the ghosts of all these various women from around the world,’ said Simon Costin. During the research process for this collection, Lee gathered together various visual references including ‘pictures of sutures, medical stitching, and facial plastic surgery’. Simon worked from the anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius and together they spent hours cutting and collaging the images. ‘It was high Gothic, Poe meets Frankenstein meets Dr Moreau,’ said Simon.50 At either end of the catwalk, which consisted of a series of Persian carpets, Costin had installed two enormous cages containing ravens and crows, birds which in his dark fantasy fed off the flesh of the faile
d human experiments. ‘Five American dollars for the first eye those birds peck out,’ whispered a publisher of an American fashion magazine in the audience. ‘It’s Tippi Hedren all over again.’ Isabella Blow – who came to the show dressed in a skintight outfit complete with collar and chain, declaimed, ‘I am my own dog.’

  Blow’s declarations were cut short by ‘banshee screams’ played over the sound system and the show started.51 Katherine Betts commented on the excessive couplings of red Chantilly lace with chartreuse pony skin; Scotch tartan paired with Japanese embroidered satin; egret feathers with Spanish mantillas, jet beading mixed with leather and lace; leopard skin stitched into purple calf and human hair embroidered onto a velvet bolero. ‘The details, the fabrics, and the references of the creations they bore were so overwrought it was almost revolting,’ she said. Shalom Harlow looked like she had been cast as Leda and the Swan, ‘the neck of which was spiralling around her neck as if to choke her’, while another model, who was dressed like a samurai complete with sword, ‘looked as if she’d slashed her own red lace dress down the front’.52 Yet the actress Demi Moore, who was in the audience, was thrilled by what she had just seen. ‘It was amazing – complete fantasy and illusion, as well as clothes that I would love to wear. Extraordinary elements of fun, grace and elegance were all fused together.’53