24. ‘I wanted to elongate the body, not just show the bum,’ McQueen said of the ‘bumsters’. ‘To me, that part of the body – not so much the buttocks, but the bottom of the spine – that’s the most erotic part of anyone’s body, man or woman.’
25. ‘When Debra Shaw, the black model, walked contorted in a frame that image had nothing to do with slavery,’ he said of Bellmer La Poupée. ‘It was the idea of the body reconstructed like a doll-like puppet.’
26. ‘You can’t come to Paris and compete with the Valentinos and the Chanels . . . and expect to win at twenty-seven,’ said Liz Tilberis, of McQueen’s debut Givenchy show in January 1997.
27. Shalom Harlow in No. 13. As she revolved like a ballerina on a music box she tried to defend herself against the assault of two robots that sprayed her with yellow and black paint.
28. McQueen at the end of Eye, in New York, September 1999.
29. After Eshu, McQueen was attacked for being a misogynist. ‘Vicious spikes framed her nose, the tips perilously near her eyes,’ wrote one columnist in February 2000. ‘What on earth was going through the mind of the man who designed it?’
30. ‘I am McQueen’s pulsing mirror, fashion’s greatest fear staring right back at them,’ wrote Michelle Olley, the model in Voss, set in an asylum.‘I am the death of fashion. The death of beauty.’
31. McQueen’s show In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692, held in March 2007, ‘was the start of him saying goodbye.’
32. The models in Horn of Plenty looked like they had escaped the madhouse of Voss and had been let loose in a glorious fancy dress box that had once belonged to a French couturier.
33. When Lee started work on his collection Plato’s Atlantis he told his staff, ‘I don’t want to look at any shapes, I don’t want to reference anything, a picture, a drawing. I want it all to be new.’
34. Lee with boyfriend Jay Massacret on holiday in the Maldives in early 2000. ‘Lee’s love life ruled him, always,’ said one close friend. ‘If he was in a good mood with whoever he was dating everything seemed to run smoothly at the studio.’
35. McQueen with boyfriend Archie Reed. ‘He seemed to have so many different personalities – there was the old lady down the bingo, the rent boy, the little boy lost. But the Lee you would see out was not the Lee you would see at home, that little boy in his pyjamas watching X Factor, who was as sweet and as loving as could be.’
36. Lee with his boyfriend and ‘husband’ George Forsyth, who he met in the spring of 2000. On a whim McQueen would organize a plane to take them to Paris for drinks, Spain for dinner and then Amsterdam for a night of clubbing.
37. Lee with his sister Janet, his first and greatest muse. He used to call her ‘the wise one’ and between them there was an unspoken bond. ‘He might have seen through me what he could do for women, help make them stronger,’ she said.
38. Lee with his parents in Claridge’s, in October 2000, just before going to Buckingham Palace to accept his CBE.
39. Lee on the Isle of Skye, which he chose as his last resting place.
40. Lee with his mother Joyce. In 2004 she had asked him what was his most terrifying fear. ‘Dying before you,’ he replied.
41. The last public photograph of Lee, taken at Harry’s Bar in Mayfair. Tom Ford, pictured here with Annabelle Neilson, later ‘thought [that] Alexander had come to say goodbye.’
42. Police stand outside McQueen’s flat in Green Street, Mayfair, where he committed suicide on 11 February 2010, the day before his mother’s funeral.
43. McQueen’s grave on Skye stands on a windswept headland, looking out towards the sea. Inscribed on the green slate headstone are the words that he had had tattooed onto his right arm, ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.’
1. Lee’s paternal grandparents, Samuel and Grace McQueen. ‘Grace kept her home and children spotless but this left very little time to demonstrate any love to her children,’ said Joyce, Lee’s mother.
2. Lee’s parents, Ron and Joyce McQueen on their wedding day, 10 October 1953. The couple had six children: Janet, Tony, Michael, Tracy, Jacqui, and in March 1969, Lee Alexander.
3. 43 Shifford Path, Wynell Road, Forest Hill, as it is today.
4. Soon after the birth of Lee, the McQueen family moved from south London to Stratford, into a council house at 11 Biggerstaff Road.
5. Lee said that he was six years old when he first realised that he was gay. On a family holiday he won a ‘Prince of Pontin’s’ competition, but he wanted the boy who came second to win ‘because I fancied him!’
6. Lee’s childhood was full of dark secrets that continued to haunt him throughout his life. ‘I gave adults a lot of time when I was young and some of them hurt me,’ he said. ‘And that way I learned even more. Let’s say I turned the negative into a positive.’
7. Lee with fellow pupils at Rokeby comprehensive school in Stratford, east London. Lee’s nickname was ‘Queeny’ or ‘Queer boy Queeny.’
8. Lee the apprentice tailor at Anderson & Sheppard, Savile Row, where he started work in 1986. ‘I hardly had any qualifications when I left school, so I thought the best way to do it was to learn the construction of clothes properly and go from there,’ he said.
9. Lee as a student at St Martins, the London college that changed his life. ‘If you were a misfit and you hadn’t fitted in anywhere, then art school was the place where you could feel at home,’ said Louise Wilson, head of the MA fashion course.
10. From the beginning, Isabella Blow called McQueen by his middle name as she thought it sounded more appropriate for a young fashion designer who wanted to make his mark. Later, Lee would insist that he had not changed his name simply because Blow believed that ‘Alexander’ sounded more upmarket. ‘I dropped my first name when I started working for myself because I was signing on at the time,’ he said.
11. Lee with boyfriend Andrew Groves, or ‘Jimmy Jumble’. The couple met in the summer of 1994 in Comptons, the London gay bar. The relationship lasted, in fashion terms, ‘four seasons’, until the couple split in 1996. ‘It was a bit like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,’ said Andrew. ‘I just thought all that high drama and energy and fighting was part of being in a full-on relationship.’
12. Lee with his Spanish friend, Miguel Adrover in the mid-90s. He remembers Lee as both shy and insecure and ‘the most fun person I ever met on this fucking planet’.
13. Lee with flatmate Mira Chai Hyde, a hairdresser and men’s grooming specialist, and his dog Minter in their Hoxton Square loft, where he lived from 1995 until early 1997. Once he asked her to cut a tramline into his hair in the form of a heart monitor that had flatlined, a symbol that he incorporated into his shows and an image that haunted him until his death.
14. Lee with Minter in the Hoxton Square loft (above), where he lived with his Scottish boyfriend Murray Arthur (below). The couple met in July 1996 and their relationship lasted two years. ‘He was my first love and he will be my only love,’ said Murray. ‘I was in it because of Lee, not Alexander, McQueen.’
15. Lee’s boyfriend Richard Brett, who he met in April 1998. ‘Lee really struggled with relationships,’ said Richard. ‘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.’
16. McQueen backstage at a Givenchy fashion show with models Carla Bruni and Helena Christensen. Joyce McQueen described the prospect of her son taking over a Paris atelier as ‘a fairy-tale’, while Lee himself said of couture, ‘It is where the dreams of your life in fashion become reality.’
17. Lee now had to travel between London and Paris, but he had little intention of learning French. ‘I remember being in a fitting with him and he was asking the guy [in the Givenchy studio] to take in the shoulder, “un petit pois”, a “little pea,”’ said one friend.
18. A newly-skinny
Lee with model Kate Moss. She described him in the following terms: ‘Anarchist, fun, thin, controversial, friend, loyal, charismatic, innovative, dark, determined.’
19. Lee with Annabelle Neilson at the Monte-Carlo Beach Hotel in May 2000.
20. Lee ‘was drawn to people who were wounded’ said his friend Daphne Guinness.
21. Isabella introduced Lee to Annabelle Neilson, but she later regretted it. ‘She did say that that was the worst introduction she had ever made,’ said Daphne.
22. A frock coat with a barbed thorn pattern from McQueen’s 1992 MA collection. He was fascinated by thorns – ‘They really represent me, they represent who I am,’ he said.
23. ‘Alexander McQueen’s debut was a horror show,’ wrote Marion Hume in 1993 in the Independent, which devoted a whole page to Nihilism under the headline ‘McQueen’s Theatre of Cruelty’.
24. ‘I wanted to elongate the body, not just show the bum,’ McQueen said of the ‘bumsters’. ‘To me, that part of the body – not so much the buttocks, but the bottom of the spine – that’s the most erotic part of anyone’s body, man or woman.’
25. ‘When Debra Shaw, the black model, walked contorted in a frame that image had nothing to do with slavery,’ he said of Bellmer La Poupée. ‘It was the idea of the body reconstructed like a doll-like puppet.’
26. ‘You can’t come to Paris and compete with the Valentinos and the Chanels . . . and expect to win at twenty-seven,’ said Liz Tilberis, of McQueen’s debut Givenchy show in January 1997.
27. Shalom Harlow in No. 13. As she revolved like a ballerina on a music box she tried to defend herself against the assault of two robots that sprayed her with yellow and black paint.
28. McQueen at the end of Eye, in New York, September 1999.
29. After Eshu, McQueen was attacked for being a misogynist. ‘Vicious spikes framed her nose, the tips perilously near her eyes,’ wrote one columnist in February 2000. ‘What on earth was going through the mind of the man who designed it?’
30. ‘I am McQueen’s pulsing mirror, fashion’s greatest fear staring right back at them,’ wrote Michelle Olley, the model in Voss, set in an asylum.‘I am the death of fashion. The death of beauty.’
31. McQueen’s show In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692, held in March 2007, ‘was the start of him saying goodbye.’
32. The models in Horn of Plenty looked like they had escaped the madhouse of Voss and had been let loose in a glorious fancy dress box that had once belonged to a French couturier.
33. When Lee started work on his collection Plato’s Atlantis he told his staff, ‘I don’t want to look at any shapes, I don’t want to reference anything, a picture, a drawing. I want it all to be new.’
34. Lee with boyfriend Jay Massacret on holiday in the Maldives in early 2000. ‘Lee’s love life ruled him, always,’ said one close friend. ‘If he was in a good mood with whoever he was dating everything seemed to run smoothly at the studio.’
35. McQueen with boyfriend Archie Reed. ‘He seemed to have so many different personalities – there was the old lady down the bingo, the rent boy, the little boy lost. But the Lee you would see out was not the Lee you would see at home, that little boy in his pyjamas watching X Factor, who was as sweet and as loving as could be.’
36. Lee with his boyfriend and ‘husband’ George Forsyth, who he met in the spring of 2000. On a whim McQueen would organize a plane to take them to Paris for drinks, Spain for dinner and then Amsterdam for a night of clubbing.
37. Lee with his sister Janet, his first and greatest muse. He used to call her ‘the wise one’ and between them there was an unspoken bond. ‘He might have seen through me what he could do for women, help make them stronger,’ she said.
38. Lee with his parents in Claridge’s, in October 2000, just before going to Buckingham Palace to accept his CBE.
39. Lee on the Isle of Skye, which he chose as his last resting place.
40. Lee with his mother Joyce. In 2004 she had asked him what was his most terrifying fear. ‘Dying before you,’ he replied.
41. The last public photograph of Lee, taken at Harry’s Bar in Mayfair. Tom Ford, pictured here with Annabelle Neilson, later ‘thought [that] Alexander had come to say goodbye.’
42. Police stand outside McQueen’s flat in Green Street, Mayfair, where he committed suicide on 11 February 2010, the day before his mother’s funeral.
43. McQueen’s grave on Skye stands on a windswept headland, looking out towards the sea. Inscribed on the green slate headstone are the words that he had had tattooed onto his right arm, ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.’
Alexander McQueen Page 43