Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  After the success of Lee’s latest own-label collection The Overlook – which had been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining – McQueen declared that he wanted to take a break from London and that his next show would be in New York. ‘The business has got to a stage where in order to expand fully in America we need to be there for one collection,’ he said. ‘We have the West and East Coast markets, but there’s a whole continent in between for us to expand in.’8

  Before the New York show, scheduled for autumn 1999, McQueen had to prepare for his Givenchy collections (ready-to-wear in March and haute couture, inspired by the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, in July) and also oversee a selection of clothes from Untitled for the V&A’s Fashion in Motion exhibition in June. Claire Wilcox, then the assistant curator of textiles and dress at the museum, wanted to display the work of McQueen, and other designers, as a live experience, turning the galleries into makeshift catwalks. ‘It’s a very democratic process,’ she said. ‘People will be able to see designer clothes, shown from all angles and as they were intended to be worn by the designer. Very few of us would otherwise get to see that, apart from on TV.’9

  McQueen was also busy planning a move in London to new studio premises in Amwell Street, Clerkenwell, and the opening of his new shop in Conduit Street, W1, financed by the Japanese fashion company Onward Kashiyama. The designer had asked Azman Owens, the firm of architects that had refurbished his house in Hillmarton Road, to compete for the project. Ferhan Azman, a small but strong woman born in Turkey, remembers the first time she met McQueen. ‘His reputation reached us before we met him,’ she said. ‘I was scared – and it is difficult to scare me. But he was very polite, respectful and courteous. He came across as a very bright, intelligent man who knew what he wanted.’ At the first meeting about the store he told Ferhan and her business partner Joyce, an American architect, about his vision for the building and described to them his working methods. ‘I am not like Calvin Klein,’ he said, ‘I don’t have a style’ – a comment that Ferhan found intriguing. ‘You cannot pick up a jacket or a dress and say it’s me,’ he said. ‘I cut. For a collection I come up with themes and I cut around them.’ He also told the architects that he had a passion for technology and that he wanted to see if they could incorporate a type of glass that changes from transparent to opaque. Initially, the two women were worried about the challenge – after all, they had seen The Overlook show and knew that he was not a conventional fashion designer. ‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ said Joyce to Ferhan. ‘He’s not Armani.’10

  The architects wanted to reflect the theatricality of McQueen’s work in the design of the store and Lee adored what they came up with: a glass changing room that was clear before you entered but which automatically turned opaque when it sensed movement; a display system constructed from stainless steel rods which resembled a giant piece of gym equipment; and a big glass vitrine at the entrance that could be filled with seasonal displays and which projected out into the street. McQueen would have liked this to have projected further, ‘as a bit of surrealism,’ he said, but the planning authorities at Westminster Council turned it down. ‘I wanted a shop that was interactive, with robots and stuff, so that people would learn something about the person behind the clothes,’ he said.11 The store also contained a range of licensed products such as sunglasses, ties, scarves, footwear and watches, most of which had not been seen outside of Japan, and a range of objects that had featured in McQueen’s shows, such as the prosthetic legs worn by Aimee Mullins in No. 13, as well as the portrait of the designer as Joan of Arc by Nick Knight.

  Most of the design process went smoothly apart from two occasions when McQueen shouted at Ferhan. ‘I also heard he used to shout at his staff and throw things, but he never did that to us,’ she said. ‘McQueen was an outsider and you could feel it at all levels. He was moody and he was a very angry person. It felt like anything could happen.’12

  Janet Street-Porter, another woman who could hardly be described as timid, also remembers the feeling of anxiety with which she approached McQueen. ‘I thought he was terrifying – and everyone tells me I’m terrifying,’ she said. ‘The three most terrifying people I’ve met were Muriel Belcher [the legendary landlady of the Colony Room], Francis Bacon and Lee McQueen. They were all very similar and employed attack as a form of defence – they got in there first – so before you’ve got a sentence out they’ve got a put-down ready.’ When McQueen’s Conduit Street store opened Janet bought five items, including a couple of suits, a brown skirt embroidered with a gold dragon, and a brown coat. ‘Because his clothes were really tailored they looked great whatever size you were,’ she said. ‘His clothes weren’t so much about sex as about power. When you wore them you knew you were in control, which is why they were great to wear to work.’ She thought some of the skirts he sold were so tight – at times they were like hobble skirts – that she found them difficult to walk in. ‘They reminded me of being a mod when I was fourteen,’ she said. ‘We had exactly those kind of skirts. Lee knew all that stuff, he was aware of tailoring not just because he had worked on Savile Row but because it was part of an English tradition.’ There was one outfit, however, that did not go down so well: a striped trouser suit that McQueen had sent over for her to wear for the premiere of Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida in New York in 2000. Janet was staying at the St Regis Hotel with Elton and, after getting dressed in the trouser suit, which she wore with a pair of high platform shoes, she walked into Elton’s suite. ‘I thought I looked quite striking but Sheila, Elton’s mother, looked at me and said to Elton, “What’s Janet come as – a fucking deck chair?” That was before I had even left the room. I’ve never been able to wear it after that, and I couldn’t sell it either.’13

  In September 1999, McQueen flew to America for his New York show in the midst of a tropical hurricane. The city was in chaos: parts of the subway system had been flooded, trees had been blown down, Bryant Park (housing the tents for New York Fashion Week) had closed, and there was even the threat that the overflowing sewage system would force manhole covers to shoot up into the sky, showering residents of Manhattan in effluence. Lee, of course, was in his element. ‘It’s brilliant,’ he said, in the run-up to the show. ‘I’ve really brought London to America, haven’t I? It’s going to test the resolve of the British stiff upper lip and all that. It would take more than a bit of wind and rain to stop us.’14 Coincidentally, McQueen had already decided to fill the stage with water, a reworking of the idea that he had used in Bellmer La Poupée. The show – called Eye and held on 16 September at a West Side pier – was greeted with rave reviews, not so much for the clothes, ‘which didn’t break any ground,’ according to Cathy Horyn of the New York Times,15 but because of McQueen’s sensational staging. ‘New York was a city waiting for the Big One,’ wrote Mimi Spencer, ‘but it turned out to be Alexander McQueen and not Hurricane Floyd that really shook up a storm.’16 The highlight of the show was the finale in which a number of ghostly shrouded figures seemed to float high above the stage in the darkened gloom. As strobe lights flickered it became clear that hundreds of sharp spikes (or were they missile heads?) had risen from the ground. The women, dressed in Arabian robes and burqas, and suspended from the roof by invisible wires, performed a beautiful aerial ballet above the deathly bed below. The image was both personal – the space above the spikes represented the realms of the spirit, a region in which Lee felt free from the dangers of the world – and political, as the show could be read as a prescient statement about the clash between the fundamentalist Islamic world and the values of the West, a conflict that resulted in the attacks of 9/11 in 2001. At the end of the show, Lee came on stage and, to the sound of Sharon Redd’s ‘Can You Handle It’, dropped his bleached jeans to reveal a pair of stars and stripes undershorts. From this closing gesture there was no doubting whose side McQueen was on.

  On his return to London, on 20 September, McQueen attended a lavish party at Lancaster House hosted by Tony and
Cherie Blair to mark the start of London Fashion Week. ‘You’re not going to show me your underwear, are you?’ asked the Prime Minister’s wife when she met McQueen, a reference to his recent trouser-dropping on the catwalk in New York.17 Later, the designer would describe her as ‘cheesy’.18 Tony Blair congratulated the guests, who included Nicole Farhi, Bruce Oldfield and Rifat Özbek, for both raising the profile of British fashion and contributing to the industry’s economic success, a business that employed more than 300,000 people in the UK. ‘There are not many industries that can say they have trebled in size in just six years,’ he said.19

  By that autumn, McQueen’s relationship with Richard Brett had already entered its final stages. Earlier in the year, Lee had begged his boyfriend to move into the house in Hillmarton Road, but after about two months of sharing McQueen’s house Richard had started to feel uncomfortable. ‘As soon as I’d moved in he became really controlling,’ he said. ‘I felt like I was losing all sense of my own identity. He also kept going on about having some kind of “marriage” and I think my refusal made things worse. He thought I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t love him or like him enough and that caused issues in the end. So I moved out of the house and back into a shared flat in West Hampstead. Lee really struggled with relationships: he wanted partners he could control but he was attracted to people who were resistant to that. His positive side was almost addictive and incredibly good fun, but when he was in a dark place he was really difficult to deal with, it was exhausting and quite draining.’

  Richard also observed how the pressures of producing multiple collections each year began to take their toll. He learnt how to absent himself from the period in the run-up to the shows when often McQueen would lash out and say hurtful things to him. ‘The fact that he was put on a pedestal made it worse because he couldn’t just do a normal catwalk show, it had to be amazing,’ he said. ‘There was a part of him that wasn’t suited to being in that world. He had some true friends, but there were people in his life who were really bad for him – I would call them the party set. They weren’t healthy for him at all. I don’t think he was suited to the excessive party lifestyle, as he was incredibly sensitive and quite a home boy. If you mix stress with drugs and add people who were a bad influence into the mix then it becomes really quite toxic.’

  In November 1999, McQueen sold the house in Hillmarton Road for £820,000, making a £200,000 profit, and moved into a rented flat in Shoreditch. The relationship between Lee and Richard was ‘fading’ and McQueen told his boyfriend that he wanted to spend some time in New York. On 8 December, Lee attended the opening of the LVMH Tower, a skyscraper on East 57th Street. At the gala dinner, McQueen, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, sat next to the model Karen Elson and Elton John. Richard Brett was expecting Lee to return to London for the New Year, but during a telephone conversation it became obvious McQueen had other plans. ‘He said that he was going to be in New York for the New Year,’ recalls Richard. ‘I said, “Well, it’s Millennium Eve, so if we’re not going to be together that doesn’t bode well, does it?” And he said, “No, I suppose not.” And that was it, that was the end.’20

  The real reason behind the split was that McQueen had already met someone else: Jay Massacret, a handsome 22-year-old photography student born in Paris and raised in San Francisco. The pair met in a bar in Hoxton, where Jay was working part-time to earn some extra cash. ‘We exchanged little notes which we gave the cocktail waitress,’ recalls Jay, who is now a stylist.21 Sebastian Pons was there at the first meeting between the two men. ‘Lee said to me, “Oh my God, I can’t believe he’s into me,”’ he remembers. ‘He also liked the fact that Jay did not know who he was. Lee’s love life ruled him, always. If he was in a good mood with whoever he was dating everything seemed to run smoothly at the studio.’22

  By the autumn of 1999, Jay and Lee had reached such a level of intimacy that McQueen felt comfortable taking him to Hilles for the weekend. ‘We liked hanging out at home and cooking,’ said Jay. ‘He had this homey sort of vibe about him. I remember we had a joint Thanksgiving/Guy Fawkes’ Night dinner. He had this huge laugh, and he was fun to be around. When I think of him now it’s always his laugh that comes into my head.’ Although Lee had told Richard that he was spending the millennium in New York, the truth was that McQueen took his new boyfriend Jay to the Maldives.23

  McQueen started the new millennium feeling happy and healthy – he had lost one and a half stone, an achievement that he said was a result of cutting out junk food and the regular ingestion of Chitosan, a dietary supplement that he bought from Harrods which he believed limited the absorption of fat. He returned from holiday feeling better than he had in months. ‘The eyes are clear, sparkling periwinkle against his tan,’ said one observer.24

  On 16 January 2000, Lee staged his couture show in Paris for Givenchy, which featured a semi-naked Erin O’Connor lying on a plinth being dressed in a checked chiffon shirt and a beautifully tailored grey suit by an aged butler. Critics described the scene as ‘tender and romantic’, and backstage McQueen told journalists that the show had been ‘all about restraint’.25 This stood in marked contrast to the show for his own label which he staged on 15 February at the derelict Gainsborough film studios in Hoxton, where Hitchcock had filmed The Lady Vanishes.

  He named the show Eshu, after a deity from the Yoruba religion that originated in Africa. Eshu was a spirit that represented fortune and misfortune, a protector of travellers and also a personification of death. McQueen must have been particularly attracted to the god because, like the designer himself, Eshu revelled in dividing opinion. One story associated with the god features Eshu walking down a road wearing a hat, half of which was black, the other side red. Villagers standing on one side of the road could only see one colour, those on the opposite the other colour. As a result the two groups argued over which perspective was the true one. Another version of the same story had the two sides killing each other over what they had seen, after which Eshu laughed and said, ‘Bringing strife is my greatest joy.’

  McQueen himself could be seen as an Eshu-like figure, a celebrator of the chaos and turmoil that he left in his wake. The day before the show an animal rights group had broken into the film studios and daubed a series of anti-fur slogans on the set – McQueen acknowledged that he used rabbit, broadtail and sheepskin in his collection, but maintained these were by-products of other industries. It had also been rumoured that the protesters had tried to booby-trap the stage, an allegation that proved untrue but left hundreds of fashion critics and celebrities (including Helen Mirren, Björk, Ralph Fiennes, Francesca Annis, Sharleen Spiteri and Jade Jagger) standing outside in the drizzle as they waited in line to have their bags searched. Tracey Emin, who had been sent with photographer Juergen Teller to report on the collection for the first issue of the relaunched Nova magazine, wrote of how unsettled she felt by the experience – ‘Juergen says to me, “You know, Tracey, there was something wrong with tonight.” “Yeah,” I say, “mate, there was nothing to celebrate – mate, there just wasn’t any Love.”’26

  The African theme split opinion like no other. While Mimi Spencer regarded the clothes as a dream – ‘the perfectly cut coat in creamy wool, with pinched shoulders and a placket-front (beautiful even though splattered with red earth); a leather dress, nicked a thousand times to let light through’27 – other female commentators believed the show to be symbolic of a deep-seated misogyny that ran through McQueen’s work. Joanna Pitman in The Times wrote how the models looked as if ‘they had done a couple of rounds with Mike Tyson and then been kidnapped by Burmese guerillas and dressed up in local tribal gear. One tottered out trying to retain a shred of dignity while wearing a mouth brace that fixed her lips permanently open in a hideous grimace . . . This contraption was decorated with two six-inch metal fangs making the poor girl look like a demented wild boar.’28 Joan Smith, in the Independent on Sunday, attacked McQueen for the way, in her view, he debased and degraded women. She
singled out imagery from his past shows, such as Debra Shaw in manacles in Bellmer La Poupée and the models in Highland Rape who she thought looked like victims of sexual assault. However, she concentrated her ire on Eshu, particularly McQueen’s decision to fit a model with a silver mouthpiece designed by Shaun Leane. ‘Vicious spikes framed her nose, the tips perilously near her eyes,’ she said. ‘What on earth was going through the mind of the man who designed it?’29 But the most inflammatory response was one written by Brenda Polan in the Daily Mail, which carried the headline, ‘The Designer who Hates Women’. The writer saw McQueen as being representative of most male fashion designers, men who had an ambivalent love/hate attitude towards women. ‘It is an issue the industry refuses to explore because the designers in question are often the best and most creative,’ she said. Polan was at her most polemic – if not downright offensive – when she brought in the question of homosexuality. ‘They [the designers] are almost always gay and it is not hard to read into their work a combination of fear for women’s bodies twinned with fascination and envy,’ she said. Photographs of the model wearing Leane’s mouthpiece were accompanied by the caption, ‘Insulting ideas: McQueen’s designs seem to humiliate women.’30

  Of course, McQueen could have hit back, but to do so would have left him open to questions about the real source of the dark imagery that ran through his work: the psychological alignment he felt with his older sister, Janet. ‘Seeing me beaten up had a lasting effect on him,’ said Janet. ‘I don’t want to sound as though I am pushing myself forwards, but Lee had this admiration for me. Because I was a bit of a mother to him he looked up to me. He might have seen through me what he could do for women, help make them stronger.’31 Lee used to call Janet ‘the wise one’; between them there was an unspoken bond, a knowledge that they had both suffered at the hands of the same man, but an awareness that they had survived. Once, when brother and sister were alone, Lee asked Janet a question that had been bothering him for some time. ‘Are you my mum?’ he asked. ‘Of course not, Lee, no,’ she replied. ‘Are you sure you are not my mum?’ he repeated. ‘No, Lee, I am not your mum,’ she said. ‘He thought that there was some sort of family secret that when I was fifteen I had had an illegitimate baby,’ said Janet.32