Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  In June, an outfit McQueen had designed for the Billy doll – an anatomically correct gay doll designed by John McKitterick – went on display at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. McKitterick had approached McQueen early on in the project and he was one of the first designers to deliver. ‘At that point he was so hot,’ said John. ‘And with his name we approached other designers [such as Paul Smith, Agnès B, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Christian Lacroix] to do it.’ The subsequent auction of the dolls, together with the design drawings, raised $425,000 for the AIDS charity LIFEbeat. McQueen had designed a bleached denim outfit for his Billy and it even featured a miniature copy of the koi carp tattoo that Lee had on his chest. ‘It was a bit like a mini me,’ said John, ‘apart from the fact that Billy didn’t look anything like him.’37

  The following month, McQueen travelled with Richard Brett on Eurostar to Paris to prepare for the Givenchy couture show. It was then, in the frantic period in the run-up to the show, that Richard saw a different side to Lee. ‘He was very stressed and anxious and not particularly pleasant to be around,’ he said. ‘He also became very stressed about the reviews the next day; he really cared about what people thought about it. If he thought his show wasn’t particularly good we would all spend a lot of time comforting him, telling him it was brilliant. Most of the reviews were good but occasionally there were bad ones and that really upset him.’38

  McQueen had chosen to stage the Givenchy show at the Cirque d’Hiver, which he had transformed into an Amazonian jungle complete with cascading water and lush greenery. On the night itself – 19 July 1998 – model Esther de Jong rode in on a white stallion and wore ‘nothing but a sheer white train scattered with exotic blooms’. The theme of the collection centred on the image of ‘woman as victorious huntress’.39 Colin McDowell criticized the show for lacking focus – ‘he gave us a sampler of all the ideas that interest him,’ he said. McDowell could not make sense of the range of references – the Amazonian rainforest, the vision of a Lady Godiva-like figure riding in on a horse, a huntress with budgerigars hanging from her belt, bows and arrows hanging randomly from belts, faces painted red ‘and, to end it all, a bizarre bride in a dovetail dress’.40 Tamsin Blanchard of the Independent accused both McQueen and Galliano of staging overly theatrical shows and employing certain attention-grabbing techniques ‘which are now looking tired and repetitive’.41

  In Paris, McQueen also had to cope with the angry demonstrations of an animal rights group sponsored by Brigitte Bardot. The protesters travelled around the city in a red double-decker bus handing out leaflets to raise awareness of the use of fur and other animal by-products in the couture shows. Alexander McQueen was one of the worst offenders, they said. ‘This man is no better than a taxidermist,’ one protester complained, a comment that must have irked him.42

  That year McQueen acquired another pet dog, an English bull terrier from Battersea rescue home, which he named Juice, ‘because that’s what Mexicans say when they send dogs in for a kill,’ he said.43 A photograph taken at the time shows him wearing pyjamas and looking bleary-eyed, cuddling Minter with one arm and the puppy Juice, brown with white paws, hanging on to his shoulder. McQueen’s brother Tony remembers a time when Lee was at the studio with Juice. ‘There was a lovely girl there and she told me that Juice had just weed on a dress, and she asked me to have a word with Lee about it,’ he said. ‘So I said to Lee, “The dog has weed on the dress!” He said, “Well, tell her [the assistant] to make another one then, the dog takes priority!”’ Later, just after Lee had bought his parents a house in Hornchurch, he took the dogs there for a visit. Joyce and Ron told him not to let the dogs jump up onto the sofa, to which Lee replied, ‘Well, I paid for the house.’44

  In August, Lee and Richard Brett went on holiday to Majorca. Lee knew the island well because of the trips he had made there with his friend Miguel Adrover. (In 2006, after he had become even wealthier from his deal with Gucci, he would buy a luxurious villa near Santa Ponsa, on the south-west coast. After his death in 2010 it was valued at £1.735 million.) ‘It was great to see him away from London, somewhere he could relax for a few days,’ said Richard. ‘He was always happier and calmer away from the stresses of London or Paris.’45 But the more successful McQueen became, the more difficult he found it to enjoy his holidays and he would often return to London after only a couple of days.

  On 17 September 1998, McQueen won an International Fashion Group award in New York. He started his acceptance speech with the words, ‘I’m so drunk I can barely even talk.’46 When BillyBoy* went for a night out with him he was always astounded by how much Lee could drink. ‘I couldn’t keep up with him,’ he said. ‘He would down more alcohol during the period of my one drink than I could ever imagine drinking. He would drink five cocktails while I was still on my first one. He loved to get plastered. But the drug thing scared me. I was concerned because he was so completely out of it. It brought out a whole other person inside of him, like a demon trying to escape unleashed.’47

  ‘When I knew him Lee liked marijuana, cocaine and alcohol,’ said Miguel Adrover. ‘Lee could never have enough. I remember one day when we were going to bed he wanted to carry on, he was not listening to anybody. It was a vice, an addiction, because I think a lot of the time he was doing it [drugs and drink] and not enjoying it. But the drugs and the insecurity that came with them were connected with the business, the industry – fashion.’48

  Richard Brett did not like what cocaine did to his boyfriend. ‘It didn’t lift him to a better place or make him happier,’ he said. ‘It took him to a dark place that was not particularly pleasant.’49

  Andrew Groves had become aware of his ex-boyfriend’s cocaine use and although this was by no means the main inspiration for his own September 1998 show Cocaine Nights, a reworking of J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel, he was conscious that there were certain resonances between McQueen’s drug habit and the collection. The catwalk had been decorated with a line of white powder and one of Groves’s models wore a dress made out of razor blades. The Sun proclaimed it the ‘sickest fashion show of all time’.50 ‘I always said I held a mirror up to the front row and they didn’t like what they saw,’ said Andrew. ‘They were put in an impossible situation where they had to give the show a bad review, otherwise they would be seen to condone drug use. Not my best career move.’51

  In contrast, however, McQueen’s professional life could only be described as supercharged. His next few shows for his own label – particularly No. 13, The Overlook and Voss – were some of the most memorable of his career. He was in demand by Hollywood – he said he had just been asked to design the costumes for Lady Penelope for a proposed remake of Thunderbirds, a project that he turned down. ‘Give me The Piano, I might think about it,’ he said.52 He was named as best avant-garde designer of the year at the VH-1 Fashion Awards in New York. Jefferson Hack, cofounder of Dazed & Confused, invited him to guest-edit the September issue of the magazine, an opportunity he seized. ‘He has always looked outside fashion,’ said Jefferson, ‘at film, photography, art and music for his inspiration, drawing from the avant-garde and the margins of contemporary culture before threading it into the mainstream.’53 McQueen told Helen Mirren, whom he interviewed for the magazine, that after he had made enough money from fashion he wanted to work as a journalist. Certainly, Lee had the right personality – he was curious, unshockable, had a prodigious memory, could sniff out a good story and thrived on controversy.

  The most controversial feature in the issue focused on a subject close to McQueen’s heart: the politics of appearance. As an overweight gay man, working within an industry that had a near-fascistic approach to physical appearance, McQueen had often been made to feel like a freak. Commentators and critics had mocked him for his weight: one went so far as to dub him not so much the enfant terrible of fashion as its éléphant terrible, while another said that, with his ‘blue eyes, downy puffs of facial hair, and an overbite flashing out of a narrow mouth,
he resembles a walrus’.54

  Although McQueen did not pretend that he had suffered the kind of prejudice experienced by the eight men and women photographed for the magazine – each of them had a physical disability – at least he wanted to try and challenge ‘the mainstream concept of what is and isn’t beautiful’, something that was becoming ‘increasingly narrow – you have to be young, you should preferably be blond and, of course, pale-skinned’. Working with Katy England and Nick Knight, McQueen matched the eight subjects with a number of different designers and, wherever possible, ‘clothes were made specifically for each individual in acknowledgement of the fact that, politics aside, people with disabilities have practical difficulties finding fashionable clothes’. The resulting images were both radical and beautiful: Alison Lapper, her naked torso covered in fragments of coloured light as styled by Hussein Chalayan; Mat Fraser wearing a golden waistcoat by Catherine Blades; and Aimee Mullins, the athlete and model, in a wooden fan jacket by Givenchy haute couture, a McQueen suede T-shirt, a crinoline frame hired from Angels and a pair of dirty prosthetic, doll-like legs that added to the dreamlike effect of the image. ‘I don’t want people to think I’m beautiful in spite of my disability, but because of it,’ said Aimee, who posed topless for the cover of the magazine wearing a pair of high-tech prosthetic legs next to the cover line ‘Fashion-able?’55

  On 27 September, Aimee Mullins – who was born without fibulas and who had the lower halves of her legs removed when she was one year old – opened McQueen’s show, No. 13, at the Gatliff Road bus depot, London, striding onto the stage in a gesture of proud defiance. Lee had designed a pair of specially carved wooden legs for her that looked like ‘sexy high-heeled boots . . . Nobody knew they were fake, which was the beauty of the whole thing.’56 The highlight of No. 13 came eighteen minutes into the show when model Shalom Harlow stood on a turntable and as she revolved like a ballerina on a music box she tried to defend herself against the assault of two robots that sprayed her (and her stunning white bouffant dress) with yellow and black paint. The installation, a reworking of Rebecca Horn’s 1988 work Painting Machine, can be seen as a tender tribute to Hitchcock’s Psycho. As Shalom raised one hand, then another, to protect herself from the robots’ approach, McQueen deliberately invoked the seminal shower scene in which Janet Leigh is stabbed to death by an unseen killer. Yet at the end of No. 13 the model was left standing, covered not in blood but just paint, a symbol perhaps of McQueen’s new optimism. After the finale, a happy and relaxed-looking McQueen came onto the stage with his two dogs and kissed his boyfriend, Richard, who was sitting in the front row next to his mother, Joyce.

  No. 13 won McQueen some of the best reviews of his career. The Guardian described it as ‘a fashion spectacle rich in imagery’, while according to the New York Times the presentation of the ‘tailored frock coats with long tails worn over modified versions of his bumster pants, Grecian-draped jersey dresses à la Mme. Grès, delicate beauties in Battenburg lace tablecloth fabric, ruffled Chantilly laces and embroidered fish net’, ‘skirts that resembled sandalwood fans’ and ‘a garment with wings made of perforated slats’ was a tour de force.57 In France, however, McQueen faced accusations that he had exploited Aimee Mullins, a charge that was vehemently denied by both the designer and the model herself. ‘This notion that, because I am an amputee and have what people consider is a “disability” I must be less capable, less confident, less intelligent and less competent to make a decision, that I must have been manipulated by Alexander McQueen, was so insulting,’ she said.58

  Soon after No. 13, McQueen prepared to move home. He had become bored of his house in Coleman Fields, selling it for a £75,000 profit, and he wanted somewhere different. McQueen’s new house – 43 Hillmarton Road, near Caledonian Road tube station, which he bought in November 1998 for £620,000 – looked quite ordinary from the outside, but at the back the previous owners had installed an enormous sash window that measured six metres high and two and half metres wide, a theatrical touch that McQueen loved. Soon after having it refurbished by the architects Ferhan Azman and Joyce Owens – the same architects who had worked on Isabella Blow’s house in Waterloo – Lee asked Richard Brett to move in with him. ‘Within six months Lee asked me to sort of marry him, in some kind of ceremony,’ said Richard. ‘I think it was some kind of security that he wanted. But I was too young, I wasn’t ready.’59

  As well as dealing with accusations of exploiting Aimee Mullins and the stresses of moving home, McQueen also had to defend himself against a charge of plagiarism. The original case alleged that Lee had copied an off-the-shoulder white dress, as worn by Eva Herzigova in his first Givenchy haute couture collection in January 1997, from fashion student Trevor Merrell. Merrell’s dress had been exhibited at a show on the Isle of Wight in June 1995, but disappeared soon after. When he saw a photograph of McQueen’s design in the newspapers he could not believe it. ‘The dress looked just like mine,’ he told The Times. ‘I do not believe the similarities are coincidental. It would be truly remarkable. Eva Herzigova was even wearing an ancient Greek-style headdress, as was my model.’ In August 1997, the London College of Fashion student was granted legal aid to fight the alleged breach of copyright. ‘I have already been told I have a strong case – the comparisons between the dresses speak for themselves,’ he said. McQueen denied all allegations, he said that he had never met Trevor Merrell, nor had he seen any of his designs. ‘It is absurd to say that, because both dresses are white and have one shoulder, that one is based on another,’ said Trino Verkade, who ran McQueen’s studio. ‘It wasn’t the first design like that and it won’t be the last. Are people going to start suing anyone who makes a strapless black dress because it’s been done before?’60 The news prompted one fashion editor to exclaim, ‘You might as well sue the Oracle of Delphi.’61

  The London listings magazine Time Out not only repeated Merrell’s allegations but also printed the claims of another student who maintained that one of her fabric designs had been plagiarized by McQueen too. McQueen, with Givenchy, launched a successful legal bid to clear his name and, on 12 January 1999, the case went before a judge at the High Court on the Strand. Trevor Merrell admitted that his opinion of McQueen was ‘none too positive’, but he still managed to see the comedic elements of the situation. He remembers the judge saying, ‘This is the High Court – IRA men come to this court – this is not the place for airy-fairy designers to argue about a lady’s dress, we are talking about a lady’s dress for goodness’ sake!’ Then, when McQueen’s lawyers objected to Lee being referred to in such derogatory terms the judge replied, ‘Gentlemen, we are not talking about Leonardo da Vinci here!’ ‘Everyone shut up after that,’ said Merrell.62

  Nevertheless, the saga continued. In June 2000, Merrell, by then an art student at Goldsmiths, was forced to withdraw from his final collection a piece he had called The Dress Wars Sofa. This was a sofa covered in hand-printed fabric featuring newspaper stories about the case. ‘Alexander McQueen has written to the college threatening them with legal action if they allow my sofa to be shown in public,’ said Trevor at the time. ‘They’ve put the corporate bite on the college and I very much resent having my work repressed . . . The freedom of Goldsmiths is the freedom of artistic expression. It has always been associated with that. I do not have a vendetta against Alexander McQueen, though sometimes it has felt like he has one against me.’63

  Chapter Ten

  ‘It was like having a boyfriend that you know you have to break up with, the only difference with this relationship was that I didn’t feel bad about doing it’

  Lee McQueen on Givenchy

  In the spring of 1999, Lee looked at himself in the mirror and was not happy with what he saw. He was approaching his thirtieth birthday and he knew that if he didn’t do something about his weight soon it could be too late. ‘It was something he talked about a lot and I guess like many in the gay community, he was under pressure to have the perfect physique,’ said Richard Brett.1 L
ee had tried going to a gym, but he had found it boring and he never seemed to be able to fit it into his busy schedule. What he needed was a quick fix and so he booked himself into a private clinic in London’s Harley Street that specialized in cosmetic procedures. A few weeks after he turned thirty he paid around £3,000 for a course of liposuction, where around eight pounds of fat from his stomach and flanks was sucked out. The treatment, which Detmar Blow likened to squeezing the toothpaste out of a plastic tube, left him with extensive purple bruising across his stomach.2 ‘But he was very pleased with it, and it did make a difference to his belly and shape,’ said Richard.3

  McQueen knew that, if he wanted to turn himself into a global brand, he would have to become more ‘marketable’ as a person. He had his teeth fixed, employing the same celebrity dentist as Jerry Hall. ‘Sometimes I would say to him, “Oh fuck off, Jerry,”’ said Archie Reed, ‘because his teeth were exactly like her teeth.’4 Slimming down was essential to this process. ‘Lee hated the way he looked,’ said Janet Street-Porter, the writer and broadcaster and a friend of McQueen’s. ‘Designers like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein are all about looking good, and for them it is just as much about marketing themselves as the marketing of the clothes. In the fashion world there is this tyranny of people, like Tom Ford, who really work on their look. Poor old Lee would have thought, “I’m in a glamorous world, but . . . ”’5 Although Lee was initially happy with his reduced girth – apart from joking that the puncture marks had left him with two extra navels – after a few months he realized that it was not the solution to his weight problem. ‘Liposuction is crap,’ he said in January 2000. ‘It doesn’t work for men. It sucks all the fat cells up, but then they just get bigger.’6 It probably did not help that, after the liposuction, Lee continued to eat a diet rich in fat and carbohydrates. Andrew Groves recalls a story one of his friends told him about going out for a meal with Lee. ‘He was eating ice cream and saying that he could have whatever food he wanted because he had just had liposuction,’ he said.7