Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  On 13 March 2001, Lee and George attended the opening of the Pop Art exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. Three days later, McQueen showed his final collection for Givenchy, a rather muted affair held once again at the house salon on Avenue George V. The usual audience of 2,000 had been cut back to a mere eighty people, mostly just buyers. Photographers had been banned from the event and there were only a handful of fashion journalists present. ‘The show was based on the signatures he has honed . . . sleek masculine tailoring softened with dove gray and lilac colors and an exuberant frothiness in blouses and full layered skirts,’ said Suzy Menkes, writing in the International Herald Tribune. ‘McQueen pulled all that together with a wide corset cummerbund that was even moulded with the body’s rib bones.’16

  That year, for his thirty-second birthday, McQueen had received a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph from Elton John. Lee had been collecting Witkin’s work since 1997 and by 2003 he owned thirteen photographs. His collection included the triptych Portraits from the Afterworld: Madame Daru, Monsieur David, Madame David (three corpses with their heads cut open and brains exposed) and A Day in the Country (which seemed to show a white stallion about to mount a naked, older woman). ‘There are so many different ways that I look at Witkin,’ he said. ‘I don’t find it extreme. I know it looks extreme to other people. But I don’t just look at the dog with its stomach out or the faeces, I look at the whole thing and I find it poetic. It relates to my work.’ With the steady stream of money from Gucci, McQueen continued to build up his collection of art. He bought photographs by Mat Collishaw, Sam Taylor-Wood, Lee Miller, Bill Brandt, and Marc Quinn, paintings by Cecily Brown and Francis Bacon, works by the Chapman brothers, and a piece made by British pop artist Allen Jones, which featured a sculpture of a woman dressed in a corset, suspenders, gloves and leather boots, her back supporting a glass table. ‘I’m not a money-minded person,’ he said. ‘I don’t really look at the price tag. If it makes me happy and it makes me skint, then so be it. If I have to sell something when I’m fifty, then I will.’ One of his favourite paintings was The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck’s work of 1434 in the National Gallery, and he always wanted to buy a work by the fifteenth-century artist Hans Memling but assumed that he would never be able to afford it. ‘I’d love to buy a Lucian Freud,’ he said. ‘I think if I could, I’d commission him to paint me because he looks deeper than the surface. It’s enough to spook you out. What he’d get from me would be psychosis.’17

  There were some friends, however, who began to worry about McQueen’s taste in art. Lee told his friend Mira Chai Hyde that he had started to see orbs of light in his house. ‘I said, “Well, no wonder, look at the art you have in the house, it’s all about death,”’ recalls Mira. She told him to get rid of the most disturbing pieces, including the Witkins, but he said, ‘They’re worth a fortune.’ ‘Put them in storage or in your office, but don’t have them where you live,’ said Mira. ‘I would tell Lee how to protect himself, how to visualize himself surrounded by white light.’18 Lee’s gardener Brooke Baker also remembers being disturbed by the kind of images McQueen had started to collect. ‘Some of the art, like the enormous photograph of his bum hole that he had above his bed, was hilarious, but later he started to amass all these photographs that I thought must have brought him down and depressed him,’ she said. ‘There was a photograph of a shell-shocked soldier and another of a decapitated woman who had been in a car accident.’19

  On 10 May, the designer introduced an hour-long question-and-answer session at the Barbican with Helmut Newton, an appearance designed to tie in with an exhibition of the photographer’s work. McQueen regarded Newton, described as the ‘35mm Marquis de Sade’ and a proponent of ‘porno chic’, as something of a kindred spirit.20 Newton, said McQueen, was ‘fascinated by powerful women, preoccupied with role play and crossing the divide between masculine and feminine’, a description that could equally apply to McQueen himself. ‘It was good for me to know at the beginning of my career and at a time when I came in for so much criticism that I had a kindred spirit in such a respected name and for a photographer like Newton I would never need to explain myself,’ he said. ‘Newton’s women look like if you tried to touch them they would try to bite your arm off, and perhaps not just your arm,’ a line that drew laughter from the audience. ‘He is interested as I am in the fine line between beauty and cruelty.’21 In turn, Newton described McQueen as a ‘true agent provocateur’.22

  McQueen’s private life was as complicated as ever. His ‘marriage’ to George had not worked out and that summer the relationship had deteriorated to such an extent that the couple were having violent arguments and neighbours near the house in Aberdeen Park often had to call the police. Lee started to see other men, one of whom was Ben Copperwheat, the cousin of his friend Lee Copperwheat. Ben had known McQueen since 1999, but after he graduated from the print design course at the Royal College of Art in the summer of 2001, the relationship between the two men became more intimate. ‘I found him to be really exciting, generous, caring, interesting, wild, dark with a lot of energy,’ Ben said.23 ‘We used to go out partying and on one occasion I went back to his place and we fooled around. At the time he was still “married” to George, but I’m not sure whether they were living together. Lee was pretty wild and he was partying more than anyone else I knew. He really liked to get completely out of it. I hung out with him about six or seven times. I remember after one time we had been taking some drug and I was completely out of it. I couldn’t get to sleep for a day and a half afterwards.’ Ben is sober now – he found it easier to give up drink and drugs after he moved to New York in 2003. ‘The culture in London is a lot more prone to drinking and drugs,’ he said. ‘If he’d gone sober it might have saved him.’24 A few years later, the two men met in New York at an event, but Lee snubbed him. ‘He was cold and distant and it seemed he did that with a few friends, he pushed them away,’ he said.25

  The relationship with George finally ended in August 2001. ‘Lee wasn’t easy to get on with and George could really wind him up,’ said Donald Urquhart. ‘One would be really angry with the other. It was clash clash clash and eventually he was worn out.’26 According to Archie Reed, Lee discovered that George had stolen some gay porn films from the house. ‘George also wanted to borrow money to pay his mortgage and they split as he felt that George just wanted fame and money and not him,’ he said.27 McQueen later expressed his sadness at the end of the relationship in a piece of fashion performance entitled The Bridegroom Stripped Bare, which was filmed for Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio as part of the Transformer season. A model with a white-painted face and wearing a white Yohji Yamamoto suit and white shirt stood on a white plinth in front of a white backdrop. Lee, with loud techno music blaring in the background, then began to hack at the suit, and with rope, a length of white fabric, a long white veil and a tin of white paint transformed the model into a bridegroom. His final touches were to tie his hands and feet with rope, add some blood-red tears onto the man’s face, throw some more paint over his feet and stuff his tie into his mouth. ‘There were about twenty-five people there watching him, silently,’ remembers Nick Knight. ‘It was, I imagine, just like watching an artist like Yves Klein or Jackson Pollock doing their thing . . . There was a great sadness to it, I thought. I don’t know how much of it was about Lee.’28

  A great deal, in fact, as the image expressed McQueen’s sense of failed romance, betrayal and isolation. ‘He had issues with trust,’ said Archie Reed, who resumed his relationship with Lee. ‘He thought that everyone wanted him because of his fame. And we were never left alone for five minutes. I’ve got a notorious reputation for fighting and I can’t begin to tell you the amount of people I beat up. Anyone he went with I would just beat up. I would drag them out of clubs and I would knock their teeth down the back of their throats, and then I would go back in and finish my pint. Which he loved, by the way.’29

  After a holiday in the Mediterranean in the summer of 2001, McQueen return
ed to London refreshed and ready to put the finishing touches to his next collection, The Dance of the Twisted Bull, the first show for his own label under the auspices of the Gucci group. The show, held in Paris like all his future womenswear collections, featured variations on flamenco dresses and toreador suits, and seemed tame after the extremes of Voss. ‘I was thinking on a business level,’ said McQueen. ‘I did that collection because I was quite new to the label [Gucci] and needed to be more accessible. It wasn’t so much about me, but the person who was buying it.’30

  McQueen was conscious of his new, more corporate responsibilities. Suzy Menkes remembers meeting him just before the Spanish-themed show and having a conversation with him about fonts and letterheads. ‘Is this the level I’ve come to?’ he joked. He told Menkes of Gucci’s plans for him: a 4,000-square-foot store in the Meatpacking District of New York which would open in 2002, and a further fifty shops worldwide; a fragrance; a menswear line; a small couture service for private clients; a range of footwear to be made by Bottega Veneta, also owned by the Gucci group; and an expansion of the offices in London. ‘There are a lot of meetings – there is a lot on the business side with opening shops and packaging,’ he said. ‘It was like starting all over again and sometimes it felt like two steps forward and twenty steps back. It’s the same as any big conglomerate and multinational – there is red tape to get through. But I’m a strong force to be reckoned with. I play the game harder. I don’t want to lose the essence of McQueen. I do think about selling goods. But I don’t have to compromise my integrity.’ The distinguished fashion writer asked McQueen about how the bumsters had inspired a worldwide trend to wear trousers and pants slung low on the hips. How would he feel if he had been paid a dollar royalty for each pair sold? ‘I’d be a rich man now,’ he replied. ‘But then, I’m rich already!’31 According to the Sunday Times Pay List McQueen earned £5.75 million in 2001.

  In order to mastermind McQueen’s image, the company took on KCD, the New York-based public relations firm. KCD executive Kerry Youmans had already met McQueen a couple of years previously when he had been invited to dinner by a mutual friend in New York. ‘When he came into the office in Paris for that first meeting he said, “I know you,”’ recalls Kerry. ‘He didn’t miss a thing. He could walk into a room and tell you what the woman was wearing on her feet across the room. He had an incredible memory. He had a huge reputation and I was a bit nervous because there was a volatility there, that he might be difficult and hard to please. But he made me feel very comfortable. That connection made our working relationship easier, he saw me as “safe”, and then we became friends.’ Over the years the pair spent an increasing amount of time together: they went out to dinner; enjoyed holidays (which Lee would always cut short, often only staying forty-eight hours); and hit the clubs of New York, Ibiza and London. ‘He seemed in an everyday way like your great gay friend from the club,’ he said. ‘He was a hilarious guy and had a wicked sense of humour. A lot of times it was a lot of fun to be around him. But then there was this other thing looming, this genius, and there was almost a disconnect. He had this inexplicable genius that was almost a gift from God, or a gift from something. With many designers there is a clear line from point of inspiration to final product. But he was totally unique. Where did that come from? How did he mash these things together? There was something unknowable in a way about his creativity.’32

  Twelve days after the Paris show, McQueen’s work could be seen at the V&A, as part of the Radical Fashion exhibition high-lighting the designs of Rei Kawakubo, Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang, Junya Watanabe, Azzedine Alaïa, Martin Margiela, Issey Miyake, Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto. On show was McQueen’s extraordinary dress from Voss constructed from hundreds of medical slides that had been painted red. ‘It took about a month and a half to make that dress,’ he said at the time of the exhibition. ‘The construction under the feather skirt is something else. It’s like an eighteenth-century crinoline. It was the only thing that would stand the shape. Everything is sewn by hand.’ McQueen had used medical slides because he said he wanted to explore the image of the body’s cells as seen under a microscope and he had painted them red because ‘there’s blood beneath every layer of skin’. Claire Wilcox, who curated that exhibition and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the V&A in 2015, remembers that the designer told her that ‘he thought there was passion in anger and that anger was a passion for him.’ ‘The experience of working with him on that show, for me as a curator, was extraordinary because I had never really realized that fashion had the potential to be so dark, but so beautiful at the same time.’33

  Radical Fashion opened just over a month after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. ‘It’s a scary time,’ said McQueen just after 9/11. ‘But it will go down in history as a time of progression.’34 Yet McQueen did not lose his sense of humour. At the launch party of the exhibition he flirted with the former defence secretary Michael Portillo under the Chihuly chandelier that hangs in the museum. ‘If I’d been allowed to vote I’d have got him in,’ said McQueen, referring to his failed bid for the Tory leadership. ‘I’ve always fancied him.’35

  Towards the end of the autumn McQueen was contacted by the Hollywood actress Liv Tyler, who he had met through Kate Moss. She wanted an outfit to wear for the premiere of Lord of the Rings on 10 December. Lee liked the fact that she was not a prima donna. ‘She’s a nice down-to-earth girl,’ he said.36 In addition to McQueen’s tailoring skills, she liked his spark and bad boy reputation. ‘Alexander almost beat up my boyfriend at that time, Joaquin Phoenix,’ said Liv, recalling an incident from five or so years previously. ‘He and Joaq had some beef or something. It was intense.’37 A few days before the premiere McQueen turned up at the Dorchester Hotel, where Liv was staying, for a fitting of the outfit that he had designed, a bright red trouser suit with a red lace, sleeveless top. Lee was not happy with the way the jacket fitted and began to attack it. ‘It felt as if I was in the hands of a true artist,’ she said. ‘I told him the shoulders felt a little tight, and out came an enormous pair of scissors. He started to snip away at the threads and then he just ripped the entire sleeve off. When I got the suit back it felt beautiful – it fitted perfectly. The jacket had millions of laces that tied around so my waist felt corseted in – I felt comfortable and sexy all night long.’38

  However, no matter how many stunning dresses he designed there was always a part of McQueen that needed to seek out other forms of creative expression. Throughout his career he was searching for a medium that would complement – or perhaps one day even replace – fashion design. ‘When we worked together he soaked up everything I did,’ said film-maker John Maybury. ‘He loved the mechanisms of film-making and he was very hands-on. His intelligence was phenomenal, he would pick up information instantly, and it would have been very easy for him to sidestep into film or theatre.’39 For the September 2001 issue of Dazed & Confused, McQueen art-directed a shoot with the Bavarian-born photographer Norbert Schoerner. The images the two men conceived and executed were as disturbing as anything seen at Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, the Royal Academy’s exhibition of the previous year. There was a photograph of a naked woman wearing Chanel haute-couture, rose-coloured silk shoes kneeling on a table, her back facing the rear end of a donkey. Another photograph showed a woman in a beautiful pale pink corset standing in a pair of green waders which are being filled by what look like the urine streams of two men standing out of the frame. An enormous pile of food waste, mixed up with offal, pigs’ heads and internal organs, and three naked boys lying amidst the rot appear in another picture. And, most disturbing of all, there is a shot of a hanging man, the lower part of his legs and feet covered with oil. ‘When American Express, McQueen’s sponsors, saw the images they didn’t want the brand to be connected with them,’ recalls Norbert.40 Schoerner believed that McQueen had a ‘direct instinct for images’ and described him as ‘more of an image-maker’ than anything.41 �
�There was a fierce quality about him, a visceral, to-the-point quality that was quite outstanding,’ he said. The photographer was impressed by McQueen’s imagination, which he compared to a ‘gilded black heart, a heart of gold with a black centre’.42

  Lee claimed that he had drawn inspiration for the shoot from Pasolini’s film Salò, but the real source was much more raw and personal. ‘It’s just about human nature,’ he said. ‘Sometimes people take control for your own benefit, then it comes down to trust. But then sometimes people you trust will abuse that trust.’ He said that the imagery explored ‘how far you are prepared to let someone control a situation’ and that the hanging man was ‘a person who is not in control’. The shot of the naked men rotting in a pile next to the pigs’ heads expressed the inevitability of death and decay. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a pig, we all end up on the scrap heap in the end,’ he said.43

  McQueen’s desire to escape himself appeared to be reaching addictive proportions. ‘Lee was constantly searching for a state where he felt comfortable,’ said his friend Kerry Youmans. ‘Peace was elusive.’44 On 14 November, McQueen attended the launch party of Fable – a magazine edited by Michelle Olley (the woman who had worn the breathing apparatus at the end of the Voss show). His old friend Eric Rose ran the door that night and remembers Lee turning up at the Cinnamon Club in Westminster ‘so off his fucking tits on cocaine’. Eric told McQueen that he had better pull himself together because on the other side of the door were a bank of photographers. ‘He had a typewriter mouth and a hooker boy on his arm,’ he said. ‘Later that night I went to the Shadow Lounge – you can tell how long ago this was because that was when it was fun – and he was there with somebody else. I said, “How did you get out?” – I was on the door the whole time. He said that he had got bored and had climbed out the fucking fire escape.’45