Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  On 4 May, Lee hosted a party at Annabel’s, the exclusive London nightclub, for the launch of Plum Sykes’s novel Bergdorf Blondes. Fellow guests included Philip Treacy, India Jane Birley, Count Leopold von Bismarck, Arnaud Bamberger, Lucy Ferry, Countess Maya von Schoenburg, Matthew Williamson, Daphne Guinness and Isabella Blow. ‘I don’t think he really liked going to parties unless he was on lots of drugs,’ said Plum. ‘If he was taking lots of drugs he would be more mean and vicious, but when he was healthy and going to the gym he would be delightful.’27 On 11 May, McQueen received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts London, along with other leading cultural figures such as Maggi Hambling, Jimmy Choo, Anthony Caro and Margaret Calvert. At the end of the month, McQueen heard the news that Isabella had reconciled with Detmar, a decision that forced him to break off contact with her for a few months. McQueen was also appalled when he heard that Detmar had endorsed a psychiatrist’s recommendation that Isabella undergo electroconvulsive therapy to help shift her depression. ‘The electric shock treatment freaked everyone out, but it worked for Issie,’ said Detmar.28 Suddenly, it seemed, for a while at least, that the old Issie had returned; the air of suicidal gloom had cleared and she was again ‘dynamic, spontaneous, positive thinking, charismatic and voluble’, he said.29

  On 3 June, McQueen staged Black, a retrospective catwalk show at Earl’s Court of some of his most iconic designs. In addition to the fashion – items included black clothes from Highland Rape, Dante, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and Voss – there was a dance performance with Kate Moss and Michael Clark, and a charity auction. Items sold included a pair of black fishnet tights worn by Madonna; Christina Aguilera’s black leather trousers; a photograph of Moss by Sam Taylor-Wood; and a collage by John Galliano. The proceeds went to the Terrence Higgins Trust. ‘I wish I was doing an original show in London, and one for more people,’ said McQueen of the event, his first London show in three years. ‘But from a business point of view there’s no point showing in London – although from a vibe point of view there’s every point.’30 At the after-show party, Kate Moss was photographed standing next to Naomi Campbell and Annabelle Neilson, who, according to one observer, ‘achieved the unthinkable and outshone her famous model friends by sparkling in one of his [McQueen’s] green Givenchy vintage gowns’.31

  McQueen had also chosen Neilson to star in Texist, a film which documented Annabelle and a Swedish male model eating, sleeping, bathing, dressing and playing with their dog (a role taken by Juice). The idea, said McQueen, was ‘to capture and isolate a situation which might come across as banal but actually is what everyone’s life is like’. The film had had its premiere in Milan in January earlier that year to promote the relaunch of McQueen’s menswear collection at the end of June in Italy’s fashion capital. ‘I designed them for myself,’ he said of the sharply tailored clothes, which won him a GQ Designer of the Year award in September and a Menswear Designer of the Year award in November. ‘In the early days when I did menswear I made the mistake of designing things I thought people would want. I hardly wore any of it.’32

  McQueen spent the summer putting the finishing touches to the wedding dress that he had designed for his assistant Sarah to wear at her marriage in August to the photographer David Burton. Lee had taken inspiration from the ‘Oyster’ dress in the Irere collection to make a gown described by W magazine as a ‘romantic English country confection’.33 Sarah Burton had always realized that although she loved the art and craftsmanship of making clothes she did not look like a self-constructed ‘fashion’ person. ‘I’m not cool,’ she said. Neither was she, unlike McQueen, motivated by a near-pathological obsession with the macabre – the motto at her girls’ school was ‘ad lucem’, towards the light. ‘I don’t have that darkness,’ she said. ‘I’m not haunted or sad. I don’t have that story in my youth.’ Burton would go on to take over the McQueen label after Lee’s death and design the royal wedding dress for Kate Middleton’s marriage to Prince William in 2011. ‘An instinctive, intelligent, imaginative young woman’s wish for a beautiful wedding dress – or any kind of dress – is the most natural thing in the world,’ she said.34

  McQueen had also been asked by his friend Plum Sykes to design her wedding dress for her upcoming marriage to the artist Damian Loeb. But then, a few weeks after Lee had started work on the design, Loeb called off the wedding. Undeterred, McQueen told Plum that he would make her a dress anyway, a beautiful gown – which she wore to her sister’s wedding – constructed from layers of corseting, metallic chocolate-brown silk and black and cream lace that he ripped up and dyed with tea. ‘It looked like a John Singer Sargent painting slightly torn up,’ she said.

  When Plum became engaged to Toby Rowland, the son of businessman Tiny Rowland, McQueen offered to make her a dress for her wedding in March 2005. The process started with a meeting at the office in Amwell Street when McQueen did a quick sketch to outline his ideas. The initial concept had been for an ‘inside-out’ wedding dress with all the luxury hidden on the inside of the garment. At one point, Plum suggested having a slightly more ‘trendy’ design, but McQueen turned to her and said, ‘Plum, your wedding day is not about looking trendy, it is about looking absolutely immaculate.’ She also suggested having a bunch of red roses to hold, but again McQueen vetoed this idea. ‘If you have a bunch of coloured flowers it will distract from the dress,’ he said. ‘It has to be white.’ Plum remembers that he made the toile, or pattern, from paper taffeta instead of a cheaper toile fabric like cotton. ‘He came into the fittings with a black marker pen and marked where he wanted to cut, then got his scissors out and cut,’ she said. ‘I have never seen anyone else do that. He really was a sculptor in fabric.’ During one fitting, towards the end of the process, McQueen started adjusting the immaculate white dress with fingers still smeared in tomato ketchup from the McDonald’s burger and chips that he had just eaten. ‘He really enjoyed making that dress,’ said Plum. ‘I remember I only paid for the cost of the fabric, otherwise it would have cost tens of thousands of pounds.’ The result was exquisite: a fairy-tale creation with a white satin corset and an eight-foot train covered in ruched silk net using a Victorian technique of gathering, with taffeta knife pleats that peaked out sharply from beneath. ‘I did invite him to the wedding, but I thought he probably wouldn’t come,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to sit through a wedding; he would have been totally bored. His scene was going out with some gay guys to really hectic gay nightclubs and getting absolutely smashed. There was a whole side to his life that people like me, and probably Issie, never saw. He kept the two sides of his life separate.’35

  At the beginning of September 2004, Lee, Archie and Isabella went to the V music festival with Archie’s aunt Jacqueline. Before they left the house in Cadogan Terrace, Archie remembers, Lee took a few lines of cocaine and by the time they got to the festival, McQueen had started to show signs of anxiety. A photograph taken at the festival shows the designer looking ill at ease and blurry-eyed. Lee did not like the fact that Isabella had bonded so quickly with Jacqueline, who joked that she would teach her new friend a few tricks about how to attract and keep men. In fact, McQueen became so jealous that he would cut Jacqueline out of photographs. ‘He was also very jealous of my daughter,’ said Archie. When Archie went to see his daughter, Lee would bombard him with calls and messages until his boyfriend returned to the house. ‘He wanted me to stand up and shout out that I was Alexander McQueen’s partner,’ he said. ‘But I just couldn’t do that at the time because I didn’t want my child bullied or to be affected by that.’36

  Back at work, the McQueen business was booming. In September 2004, Jonathan Akeroyd from Harrods was appointed the new CEO of the company, a man described by McQueen as ‘a really good CEO from the same side of the tracks’.37 Lee told his bosses that he would like to spend more time in New York and consequently Gucci arranged for him to have an office in its new building. On a whim, McQueen rented an expensive brownstone in the W
est Village for a year, ‘but was in it only for something like a week before he went back to London,’ said his friend Sue Stemp, who he had employed to work for him in Manhattan.38 ‘London drew him back; he realized he didn’t want to be in New York,’ said Kerry Youmans. ‘It was a case of, “What am I going to do to fill this hole?”’39

  One of the reasons why McQueen felt he could not live in New York was because, in the autumn of 2004, he had met another man in London who he hoped would change his life. One night McQueen had gone to Barcode – the same gay bar in Soho where he had met his former boyfriend, Richard Brett – and had started chatting to Glenn Andrew Teeuw, a handsome, 34-year-old Australian who had a shaved head and a handlebar moustache. After going to another bar for a drink, they made their way back to Lee’s house in Hackney. ‘He took my number and then a week or so later he called,’ said Glenn, who worked in a bar at the time. ‘One night became two, became three, until I was living out of a suitcase at the end of his bed.’ The love affair started well: the pair enjoyed cooking, spending time together at the cottage in Fairlight – ‘he became a different person in the country,’ Glenn said – and walking by the sea with the dogs. ‘It was a whirlwind romance,’ he said. One weekend, Lee and Glenn went to a tattoo parlour in Hastings and had each other’s initials inscribed onto their skin – McQueen had G. A. T. in blue ink on the inside of his wrist and Glenn had L. A. M. in red ink on the inside of his right arm.

  It wasn’t long, however, before McQueen’s paranoia began to poison the relationship. Lee constantly questioned his new boyfriend’s commitment to him and once, when he was away in New York, McQueen employed a private detective to trail Glenn. ‘Once that paranoia sets in, it is so destructive,’ said Glenn. ‘I remember once, soon after we started seeing one another, going to a party where there were the Chapman brothers and Vivienne Westwood. He took off and went home and when I got back to the house he turfed me out on to the street because he thought I had been checking out some guy.’ The relationship lasted three years, but there were often times when, in the middle of the night, Glenn would be thrown out. Months would go by when the pair would not see one another, but then they would be drawn inevitably back together. ‘It was incredibly volatile,’ said Glenn. ‘It was almost like an addiction. We couldn’t leave one another alone, but it was attraction and destruction.’

  One day, Lee told Glenn that they were going shopping – he wanted his boyfriend to buy him a present. ‘He took me to Boucheron [the jeweller on New Bond Street] and he wanted me to buy him a diamond pinkie ring, which cost £2,500. He knew I had no money, and so I had to put it on my credit card,’ said Glenn. ‘The same thing happened when he had booked a holiday for us in Fiji. He told me that if I didn’t pay for my part of the holiday – which cost £3,000 – I wouldn’t be able to go, and if I didn’t go then that meant we were over. I racked up huge credit card debts during my time with him. For him it was a game, it was all about me proving my commitment and love for him.’

  The relationship was fuelled by a shared love of drugs. ‘He hated the fashion world for introducing him to cocaine,’ said Glenn. The pair took the drug in McQueen’s office while he was at work, sometimes when they were in restaurants having dinner, and at the house in Cadogan Terrace. There they would mix it with alcohol and strong sleeping pills, a cocktail that doctors believe is particularly toxic and dangerous. ‘We would be locked in the bedroom for two days at a time, it was craziness,’ said Glenn, who no longer touches drugs. ‘It was a way for him to escape.’40

  Despite McQueen’s drug binges, his collections went from strength to strength, as he drew inspiration from the world of cinema. Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock, about the real-life disappearance of a teacher and a number of girl pupils, influenced the ‘intense, knife-pleated and smocked tailoring and doll-like silhouettes’ of It’s Only a Game in Paris on 8 October 2004. The final part of the show, an elaborately choreographed human chess game, was a reference to a scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (The show closed to the sound of ‘Suspicious Minds’, a song which includes the line, ‘We can’t go on together,’ another indication of McQueen’s desire for escape.) References to aesthetically diverse films such as Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot and Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine found expression in McQueen’s menswear collection in Milan in January 2005. And Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much provided the title for McQueen’s elegant show in March that year, a collection that also took inspiration from his films Vertigo and Marnie. ‘You could almost see Doris Day, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren in McQueen’s grey suits, which featured tight-fitting skirts and jackets and accentuated the waist, or a short black coat with a gored back,’ wrote one fashion reporter.41 In May 2005, McQueen announced that he would design a range of sports shoes for Puma. One of the trainers, which he called ‘My Left Foot Bound’, included a cast of the designer’s left foot suspended in transparent rubber and visible through the sole. ‘A bit Damien Hirst, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Quite weird. Nicey nicey just doesn’t do it for me.’42 In July, he launched a range of handbags, which included one named Novak, after the star of Vertigo. Then in early 2006, McQueen announced that he would soon release McQ, a more affordable range designed for a younger clientele. ‘The new collection is a renegade version of the mainline,’ he said.43

  Lee had always been drawn to rebels, anarchists and martyrs. In July 2005, Radio 4’s Today asked him to take part in the search for Britain’s greatest painting. McQueen nominated Paul Delaroche’s 1833 work The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, a picture depicting the nine-day queen in the moments before her beheading and which had also inspired his Givenchy show in July 1999. He chose this particular work from the National Gallery, he said, because of the subject matter of the painting. ‘It’s just very imposing, very melancholic, pretty much like my own personality,’ he said. ‘The painting shows a blindfolded Jane about to be executed in one of the chambers of the Tower of London. What lures me to this painting is the balance, the colour. She is shown . . . almost like an angel, ethereal. She is in white, in this duchess satin dress, but she stands tall even though she is in her last moment . . . It’s quite a tormented picture because you want to jump into the picture and save her . . . It’s just despicable, it makes you grief-stricken as well for her. Personally, it’s a form of terrorism in itself by a government, so it’s quite political for me, as well as being a beautiful picture in itself.’44

  McQueen’s protective instincts came to the fore a couple of months later when, on 15 September 2005, the Daily Mirror ran a story on its cover entitled ‘Cocaine Kate’. The newspaper alleged that the 31-year-old model Kate Moss had snorted five lines of the drug in forty minutes. Moss had been filmed by a secret camera at a recording studio in west London with her then boyfriend, Pete Doherty, front man of the band Babyshambles. In the weeks that followed, Moss was dropped as a model by Burberry, H&M and Chanel, losing millions of pounds in prospective earnings, and was criticized by the British press for being both a bad role model to teenage girls and an irresponsible mother. There were even reports that she could lose custody of her two-year-old daughter, Lila Grace, whose father is Dazed & Confused editor Jefferson Hack. Yet Kate Moss was never charged and McQueen was indignant at what he saw as a modern-day witch hunt. He made his feelings clear when he appeared on the catwalk at the end of his Neptune collection in October wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘We Love You Kate’. ‘She’s not the first person in fashion to do cocaine, and she won’t be the last,’ he said. ‘She’s done more for London fashion than anyone else. Go to the newspapers and wipe their toilets. Fucking hell, you’ve got Columbia on your hands!’45

  McQueen further expressed his support for Moss in his next show. On 3 March 2006, at the end of Widows of Culloden, she appeared as a hologram inside a glass pyramid, a beautiful spectre swathed in an ethereal chiffon dress, shimmering like a mirage as John Williams’s haunting theme from Schindler’s List echoed around her
. Moss later recalled how McQueen had first told her about the project. ‘He said, “I’ve got this idea, I want you rising like a phoenix from a fire.”’46 The film, shot by Baillie Walsh, served as a love letter to the model McQueen called ‘a female version of me’.47 Kerry Youmans remembers, soon after arriving at the venue, being asked by Lee whether he had seen the hologram. ‘When I said that I hadn’t, he told me to come and sit with him,’ he said. ‘We sat and watched the hologram and it was so moving because he was so moved by it. And during the show itself I saw members of the audience in tears.’48

  The collection, inspired by an imaginative vision of the women left behind after the battle of Culloden, the final confrontation in the Jacobite Rising in Scotland in 1745, included a gown made entirely from pheasant feathers. Other clothes were made from McQueen tartan, and there was a model wearing a beautiful cream silk and lace dress with a pair of antlers sticking through a delicately embroidered lace veil on top of her head. McQueen was looking back to his own Scottish ancestry as narrated to him by his mother. ‘I wanted to start from the crux and the crux is my heritage,’ he said. ‘Fundamentally, the collection is luxurious, romantic but melancholic and austere at the same time. It was gentle but you could still feel the bite of the cold, the nip of the ice on the end of your nose.’49