At the end of 2001, Lee claimed that he wanted to scale down his party lifestyle. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I’m giving up all the drink and drugs and all that stuff.’ When journalist Maggie Davis questioned him on this, he responded, ‘I don’t think you should forsake drinking and partying, but there comes a time in everyone’s life when it just doesn’t have the same effect any more, and you see there are better things in life than sleeping off a hangover.’46 Friends learnt to see through certain statements McQueen made in the press. In the same interview Lee told Maggie Davis that he had just passed his driving test; the truth was he never carried more than a provisional licence and although he loved driving he always had to have an experienced driver in the car with him. Around this time his brother Tony McQueen went with him to buy a car, a VW Golf. Later he purchased two more vehicles: a Jeep, which he used to transport his dogs, and a Vauxhall Corsa, which Tony said he never saw move from outside his brother’s house. ‘He asked me once to take the test for him,’ said Tony. ‘He couldn’t be bothered to do it himself.’47
McQueen often told journalists that he had decided to relinquish promiscuity in favour of monogamy, a declaration that would have Kerry Youmans rolling his eyes in amazement. ‘He was always telling me that I needed to settle down and stop being such a slut,’ said Kerry. ‘It was good advice but maybe he was saying it to himself as much as to me. He and I were maybe similar in that way, in that we had a difficult time reconciling our lives as gay men with the idea of romantic love. And he had a difficult time trusting people.’48 Tony remembers having a conversation with his brother about his private life during which Lee turned to him and said, ‘Tony, there’s so much shit out there. All they want is money.’ Tony was saddened to hear that Lee did not seem to have one partner with whom he could settle down. ‘I remember those words, “There’s so much shit out there,”’ he said. ‘But in his life that was par for the course. I used to say to Lee, it’s like playing with a loaded gun; in this day and age it’s so dangerous.’49
Lee’s inclination towards promiscuity did not mean that he was not also prone to grand romantic gestures. One winter, after a heavy snowfall, Archie Reed lay in bed at his house in Totteridge Lane with a bad back. Lee rang asking him to come over, but Archie said he was unable to move because of his sciatica. McQueen refused to take no for an answer and said that he would send a helicopter over to pick him up. ‘I told him that would cost£150,000, and not to be so ridiculous,’ said Archie, who had a tattoo of the letters ‘L’ for Lee and ‘A’ for Alexander that snaked around his neck. Another tattoo ‘Love Guidance Always’ ran from his shoulders up to meet the initials. ‘He was highly passionate, on every level.’50
McQueen’s dark romantic spirit found full expression in his next Paris show, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, held on 9 March at La Conciergerie, the former prison where Marie Antoinette was held before she was executed by guillotine in 1793. The designer was fascinated by the history and costumes of the French Revolution and although he could not read French he loved looking through his copy of Charles Kunstler’s 1943 illustrated book on the French queen. The show opened with an image straight from a fairy-tale: a young girl wearing a mauve bonnet and cape leading two wolves through the dungeons. McQueen had asked film director Tim Burton, who shared his gothic sensibilities and who had designed the invite, to create the lighting for the show. ‘There were leather bras, contrived like harnesses and, often, conjoined to straps which delineated the torso and derriere, over satin French knickers and camisoles, but even these appeared graceful, not gratuitous,’ said Hilary Alexander in the Daily Telegraph.51 Both the critics and the buyers thought that the show with its ‘whispered menace’ had been a work of genius.52 But there was one fashion outsider in the audience who had his doubts: respected war correspondent Anthony Loyd who had been sent to report on Paris fashion week by The Times after Suzy Menkes had criticized the busy schedule for being ‘inhumane’. Loyd observed that the wolves – which were in fact ‘hybrids’, a cross between wolves and huskies – appeared to be doped, dazzled by the lights and scared of the crowd of people around them. But what made him more anxious was the sinister imagery of the show. ‘It looked like a misogynistic fantasy of warped sexual dawning and about as corrupt and twisted as anything I had seen that day,’ he wrote, ‘albeit entirely in keeping with a world dominated by the despotic chimera of eternal youth, power, sexuality and the tyranny of beauty.’53
Loyd could have been describing the ritual of the annual Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles in which the world’s most beautiful women aim to communicate and intensify the strength of their erotic capital by their appearance on the red carpet. That year Gwyneth Paltrow had chosen to wear a McQueen outfit similar to one worn by the Estonian model Carmen Kass in the show two weeks before, a shirt made from see-through black mesh and a skirt of black silk. The Sun criticized Paltrow for wearing nothing underneath this ‘tatty vest’ and critics called the ensemble one of the worst Oscar dresses on display; later the actress admitted that she should have worn a bra.54 McQueen, however, was pleased with the look; it gave him a thrill to see her wear something that exposed more than her vulnerabilities. ‘I like Gwyneth, she’s a sweet girl, a typical American blond-haired, blue-eyed girl,’ he said. ‘Done well in the movie business. But I want to pull her apart and put her back together the way I see fit. I like to take people’s characters out of themselves.’55
At the beginning of May 2002, McQueen bought a two-bedroom cottage near the sea – the Old Granary, on Warren Lane, Fairlight, three miles east of Hastings. The property, on sale at £340,000, was small and simple, but it represented an escape from the pressures of work that Lee felt he so desperately needed. ‘I don’t find inspiration there – it gives me peace of mind,’ he said. ‘Solitude, and a blank canvas to work from, instead of the distractions of the concrete jungle.’56 Often he would travel down to East Sussex with his dogs Minter and Juice on Fridays and return to London on Mondays. ‘He liked getting away from what can be perceived as the brutality and hardship of life,’ said Jacqui. ‘He loved walking along the beach with his dogs and being alone with his thoughts.’57
Mira Chai Hyde remembers many visits to Fairlight to visit Lee, where she would cook him one of his favourite meals, chicken burritos using ingredients that she had bought in Los Angeles. Often the television would be tuned into cookery programmes, which Lee liked to watch as he said it relaxed him (he could rustle up a mean Thai prawn curry, using plenty of lemongrass). ‘At the end of the day Lee yearned for a simpler way of living,’ said Jacqui. ‘He was very happy to eat beans on toast as well as fine food.’58 At work, Lee would often start his day with a bowlful of corn flakes, which he took with ice-cold milk, or toast and Marmite. In East Sussex, if guests had enjoyed a roast and there were leftovers he would take the food to the edge of the garden where it could be eaten by foxes. At night, when it was pitch black, Lee would sometimes slip outside the cottage and suddenly appear at a window with a torch under his face to frighten and amuse unsuspecting guests. ‘There was a skein of humour running through everything he did,’ said Daphne Guinness.59 The one thing that always made Janet McQueen laugh was when he would say, in a mock-pretentious tone, ‘It’s not all about you, you know – it’s all about ME!’60 And his staff would find it funny when he cleaned his ears with a pin.
Yet McQueen had earned the right to let his achievements go to his head a little. Joan Kaner, senior vice-president and fashion director of US department store Neiman Marcus, said that McQueen had ‘reached his pinnacle’,61 while Vogue called him ‘a creative god’.62 Over the course of six months, McQueen’s office in Amwell Street had expanded over three floors and Lee had appointed a new CEO, Sue Whiteley, formerly the head of womenswear at Harvey Nichols. ‘We had to ask ourselves, “What was our story going to be? How do you build a brand?”’ said Sue. ‘Alexander McQueen had a very limited business in America. It was tiny. We realized there was a gap in the market. We co
uld enter and have a unique voice.’63
McQueen had appointed architect William Russell, who was married to a good friend of Trino Verkade’s, to design his stores in New York and Tokyo, both of which opened in 2002, and Bond Street, set to open the following year. ‘He asked me to create a new concept for his shops,’ said William. ‘He wanted a collaborative relationship, rather than someone imposing a look or a feel onto him.’ Russell had set out a programme of six months in order to experiment and explore his ideas, but a space in Tokyo came up and the architect had to work to a deadline. He had been inspired by a recent trip to Lalibela, in Ethiopia, where some of the buildings had been carved out of hillsides and cliff faces and, together with McQueen, he came up with the concept of a store hewn from a solid block of white material. ‘He wanted to make a cave filled with light,’ he said.64 Lee wanted all the stores to have an ‘ethereal’ quality to them and the space in New York, on West 14th Street in the Meatpacking District, referenced aliens and space travel. ‘I wanted something completely different, so I went for this spaceship-type feel like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ he said, ‘where everything sort of levitates off the floor with this mother ship in the middle and all of these satellites sprouting from the top.’ One observer who visited the shop noted how the space had an ‘other-worldly’ quality and how ‘burnished, carved busts hang throughout the store resembling floating corpses of sorts’.65
There was something of the extraterrestrial about the image of McQueen photographed for the cover of the September issue of The Face magazine. Shirtless and with his head shaved, he looked as though he had been sprayed with silver paint. During a question-and-answer interview the designer told journalist Chris Heath about his desire to push fashion into the future. He said that ideally he’d like to use liquid steel to forge a dress. ‘I can’t, because it’d scald the person wearing it,’ he said. ‘Someone’s got to live, or what’s the point? But I’ve always wanted to construct clothes on a computer where you type in the measurements and the garment is weaved on the person as they stand there.’ The journalist asked McQueen a series of questions. What song did he play when he was sad? Anything by Mary J. Blige or Alicia Keys, he said. What was his favourite obscenity? ‘Cunt,’ he replied. ‘Because everyone hates it.’ How many times had he been in love? ‘Nearly twice,’ he said. Did he want a child? ‘Yeah, I’m going to try,’ he said. Why did he want one so much? ‘Because I deserve one.’ When did he feel most alone? ‘When I’m under stress, under pressure.’ When did he feel happiest? ‘When I’m in bed with someone I love,’ he said. Did he have any recurring dreams? ‘Snakes. Wriggling around my body. They’re poisonous ones . . . Everywhere. Between my legs. All over my body . . . I also have the dream where the room’s closing in.’66
Escape was the theme of McQueen’s next show Irere, held on 6 October 2002 in a sports stadium on the outskirts of Paris. Named after the Amazonian word for ‘transformation’, the show took place in front of a screen measuring fifty feet by twenty feet onto which was projected a film by John Maybury, who McQueen had first met in the early to mid-nineties. ‘I would see him at various clubs in London and he was really funny, with always a snide comment about someone who was wanky or pretentious,’ said John, the director of Love Is the Devil, a film about Francis Bacon which McQueen loved. ‘When he asked me to come in I found it interesting to see him in this new context. He put out this slightly tough image; he was not your archetypal fashion person by any stretch of the imagination – there was nothing fluffy or frilly about him – and he had a fantastic sense of humour. He had this incredible clarity – he had a whole narrative in his mind – and we filmed the story of this shipwreck in a large water tank. During the shoot for the show, Lee was there, acting as co-director and art director. He wasn’t hands-off in any way, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. The model twisted and turned under water like a scene from a ballet and then this beautiful boy plunged in to rescue her. That sequence was incredibly romantic.’67
The first shot in the film was taken from under water looking up towards the light, an image that McQueen may have remembered from his days with the synchronized swimming club. McQueen had relived this experience at the end of an advertising shoot earlier that summer when, after Steven Klein had finished taking the photographs of a model in a tank of water, McQueen had jumped in fully clothed. The resulting portrait was published in W magazine. In the last years of his life, Lee also loved going away to the Maldives, where he enjoyed scuba diving. ‘Under water, I feel most at peace,’ he said.68
The spirit of the Irere show, full of vivid limes, bright oranges and startling chrome yellows – and featuring a chiffon dress in the colours of the rainbow – was undoubtedly optimistic and suggestive of the redemptive power of nature. And when McQueen, with newly dyed blond hair and wearing an exquisite white suit, appeared at the end of the show, observers noted how happy and healthy he looked. ‘He certainly was in a great place at that time,’ said John Maybury. ‘He was at the top of his game. Each piece was a sensational couture piece even though it was meant to be ready-to-wear. His enthusiasm and energy were like something you could warm your hands on. He was like an energy battery.’69 Susannah Frankel said of the collection, ‘Should a desert island ever be inhabited by such beauty, we might all wish to live there.’70
One of the highlights of Irere – a piece that would become something of a fashion icon – was the so-called ‘Oyster’ dress. This garment, made from hundreds of different layers of ivory silk and described by Metropolitan Museum curator Andrew Bolton as ‘almost like a mille-feuille pastry’ reportedly cost almost
£45,000. Sarah Burton recalls how Lee constructed the extraordinarily complex piece – ‘the top part of the dress is all fine boning and tulle, and the chiffon is all frayed and dishevelled on the top,’ she said. ‘The skirt is made out of hundreds and hundreds of circles of organza. Then, with a pen, what Lee did was he drew organic lines. And then all these circles were cut, joined together, and then applied in these lines along the skirt. So you created this organic, oyster-like effect.’71
Culturally, McQueen occupied a curious position by this time as he attempted to bridge the gap between the sophisticated fashion scene and the mass market.
For example, after accepting a VH-1 Vogue award in New York, McQueen travelled on to Las Vegas where, on 1 November, he oversaw a catwalk show in a mall in front of 2,500 guests. Back in Britain, McQueen became involved in a row about which celebrities should wear his clothes. In October of that year, the television presenter Ulrika Johnson had been photographed wearing an aubergine-coloured, low-cut McQueen dress. ‘She didn’t get it from us,’ snapped the designer, outlining how his office had not sent her the outfit to wear.72 Johnson was just one of a number of celebrities, including Victoria Beckham and Paris Hilton, who the designer regarded as too uncool to wear McQueen. ‘If I dress someone, it’s because I have a relationship with them – we are either friends or I am a fan of their work,’ he said.73 McQueen believed it was perfectly possible to go global and still remain true to the aesthetics of the avant-garde. ‘If I can’t keep honest then I’m not going to do it,’ he said.74
The end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003 was a time marked by a number of professional triumphs for McQueen. He had entered into a partnership with Savile Row tailors, Huntsman, to design a new collection of bespoke suits. Liv Tyler commissioned him to make a variation of the ‘Oyster’ dress for the New York premiere of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in December and then a white empire-line gown for her wedding in April. Scanners, McQueen’s Paris show in March 2003, received glowing reviews, particularly the sight of a model battling her way through a transparent wind tunnel wearing a hand-painted silk parachute dress. ‘Should Alexander McQueen ever tire of wearing a pincushion on his wrist, he might give movies a shot . . .’ wrote Guy Trebay in the New York Times. ‘Mr McQueen is a talent on an Orson Welles scale.’ Trebay noted that the invitation to the show – a grid sho
wing sections of McQueen’s brain taken by a CT scanner – suggested the designer’s assertion that ‘surface is not everything’.75
At the beginning of March McQueen denied the rumours swirling around the fashion industry that he was next in line to take over from Tom Ford at Gucci, or that he would move to Yves Saint Laurent. ‘I’d rather kill myself,’ he said. ‘When I was at Givenchy I ended up designing fourteen collections a year, including stuff for my own house. It frazzled my mind. I’m never going back to that.’76
On his thirty-fourth birthday, 17 March 2003, Lee launched his perfume Kingdom, and on 7 May he opened his new shop in Bond Street with a party attended by a host of celebrity friends. On 2 June the Council of Fashion Designers in America named him Best International Designer. ‘Anarchist, fun, thin, controversial, friend, loyal, charismatic, innovative, dark, determined,’ wrote Kate Moss in the brochure that accompanied the award ceremony. ‘For McQueen . . . this was a moment in the sun,’ wrote Susannah Frankel in the Independent.77 At a trunk show held at his New York store the same day ‘the city’s great and good’ spent $1.2 million on clothes from the Scanners collection. Two weeks later, McQueen heard that the Queen had appointed him Commander of the British Empire. That summer, major refurbishment work started on the four-storey house, 82 Cadogan Terrace, Hackney, which McQueen had bought the previous October for £700,000. ‘He bought the house because it was located on ley lines,’ said Archie Reed. McQueen spent £120,000 on a koi garden, designed by Brooke Baker, and hundreds of thousands more on the house. There was a steam room, a yoga room, a gym which he only used a couple of times and a large retractable roof light above the bed, ‘which he refused to open in case a bird crapped into the bedroom,’ said Archie.78 There was also an aquarium that was installed in the wall dividing the bedroom from the bathroom. ‘If only those fish could talk,’ quipped one friend.
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