Homework was not Lee’s strong point, and he preferred messing about with his friends on the estate. He and Jason would throw stones at the caravans belonging to a group of gypsies that pitched up on a patch of industrial wasteland at the back of the estate and then run as fast as they could. They loved getting into abandoned shopping trolleys and riding them around the streets. The boys would also tie a rope from a nearby footbridge and use it as a swing; one day, when another friend, Raymond, was playing on it, Lee and Jason cut the rope and the boy came crashing down. They carried out the same trick on another boy who was playing on a swing under the railway bridge; but this time ‘the kid fell in the river – we were pissing ourselves,’ said Jason.
There used to be a petrol station on the corner of Jupp Road West and Carpenter’s Road. Often the boys would tie an old wallet or purse to a length of fishing wire. Then, they would place the wallet on the forecourt of the petrol station and hide. They thought it was hilarious when someone stopped to pick up the purse and they would pull it away; even more hilarious was the sight of a man or woman chasing the wallet across the ground or around the petrol pumps. ‘We were just terrors, making people’s lives a misery,’ said Jason. In the run-up to Bonfire Night, Lee, Jason and their little gang would try to light the bonfires of rival gangs on nearby estates; for hours on end they would stand outside in the freezing cold guarding their own tall piles of broken pallets and waste wood.77
One day in 1983 their schoolboy pranks nearly got them into trouble with the police. ‘I stole some drink out of a drinks factory when I was about fourteen,’ said McQueen later when asked whether he had ever broken the law.78 Jason recalls the incident well: a favourite game involved trespassing on the Schweppes’ industrial unit situated by a walkway near Abbey Lane. The boys would climb over the fence and steal into the backs of lorries where they would enjoy a tonic water or a ginger ale. ‘I remember once we heard the coppers walking past and so we hid, but they found us,’ said Jason.79
Peter Bowes maintains that Lee was ‘quite a tough guy – he wasn’t scared of people’,80 and, despite Lee’s nickname at school of ‘Queeny’ or ‘Queer boy Queeny’, Jason ‘didn’t believe he was gay’.81 After school, and at weekends, Lee and Jason would go to the back of a local engineering firm situated near the river Lea. There, Lee would kiss a string of local girls – there was Sharon, Maria, and Tracy, who was a dwarf. ‘I don’t want to go into details but I know three girls who Lee kissed and cuddled,’ said Jason. ‘One of them went a bit further, not full sex. It was messing around. As far as being gay, no way – that was a big surprise.’82 One detail Peter noticed, but never commented on, was the fact that often Lee wore girls’ white socks to school. He never knew whether this was because Lee had to borrow his sisters’ socks due to the family’s economic circumstances or whether it was a way for his friend to express an aspect of his sexuality. ‘And if he was alive today I would ask him,’ he said.83
A black and white photograph taken in Lee’s third year at school shows that style or fashion did not feature prominently in the lives of the boys from Rokeby. At the end of term they were given permission to shed their uniform and come to school in their own clothes. Most boys chose to wear parkas made from nylon, most probably the coats they wore over their blazers each day, together with nondescript shirts, sweaters and trousers. Stylistic references to pop-cultural movements such as Punk or the New Romantics are noticeably absent – it’s even difficult to spot one pair of jeans – and the boys look like miniature versions of their working-class fathers. Neither is there anything striking about Lee’s appearance. Dressed in a functional monochrome jacket, he looks directly to the camera, with a smile on his face. Perhaps he’s smiling because he knew he was going places.
Sometimes Peter and Lee would take the lift to the top of James Riley Point, one of the tower blocks on the estate, and smoke Embassy Number Ones sitting on the back staircase looking out towards Essex. There the two boys would chat about school, the estate and their futures. Lee had a sense of yearning, a desire to achieve something, but he was realistic enough to know that he was, in the eyes of his teachers at least, ‘just another East End oik going nowhere fast’.84 ‘I don’t think he knew where he was going, but he wanted to do something artistic, something creative,’ said Peter Bowes. ‘But you’ve got to remember that we were boys on an inner London estate. We never really got opportunities. The school was a factory – get you in, keep you safe, push you out at the end and whatever you got, good luck to you.’85 Peter remembers one conversation he had with Lee about his middle name. ‘He was fascinated by Alexander the Great and he claimed to have found in his family a link back to him,’ he said. The allure of the past was working its magic on Lee; for him it would increasingly represent a place of romance and security, an escape from the harsh reality and pain in his life.
Towards the end of his time at Rokeby, Lee started to suffer from sudden attacks of frustration and anger. ‘I wouldn’t say he was bipolar but he had his ups and downs with moods,’ said Peter. ‘He had a bit of a temper on him as well. I remember in certain lessons he would be chatting and he’d get told off. He would erupt and kick off and get thrown out or put into detention.’86
None of his friends at school could have realized it, but Lee later claimed he was suffering yet more sexual abuse during this period, this time at the hands of a teacher. Again Lee kept the abuse to himself, only telling his sisters later in life. Years later, when Jacqui learnt of the two counts of abuse suffered by her brother everything began to make sense: the anger had to come out somehow and Lee later expressed it through his work, an opinion echoed by the Metropolitan Museum’s Savage Beauty curator Andrew Bolton, who said, ‘McQueen sewed anger into his clothes.’87
On 27 May 1985, just as Lee was preparing to sit his O levels, his brother-in-law Terence Hulyer left the house on Marlborough Road, Dagenham, that he shared with Janet and his two sons, to get a morning newspaper. As he drove down the street the 35-year-old factory worker suffered a massive heart attack and lost control of the car, which careered into a nearby house. He was taken to Oldchurch Hospital, Romford, where he later died. Hulyer had been a diabetic from the age of eighteen and in those days, according to Janet, sufferers ‘used to take pork insulin, derived from pigs, and it furred up the arteries’.88 Lee must have felt relieved at the death of one of his abusers, but perhaps he also felt guilty; after all, he must have wished his brother-in-law dead on more than one occasion.
McQueen’s puberty and sexual awakening in the eighties coincided with the rise of a virus that was widely dubbed in the media at the time ‘the gay plague’. As a result, Lee was, in the words of New Yorker writer Judith Thurman, ‘forced to witness a primal scene that haunted the youth of his generation: sex and death in the same bed’.89 For a young imaginative gay man like Lee, the spectre of AIDS was all too real. The imagery associated with the disease – from the television adverts featuring grim reapers and icebergs to the newspaper front pages showing men as thin as skeletons – sent out a seemingly ineluctable message that if you were a gay man you had a high chance of dying young. In addition to the roll call of famous faces – Rock Hudson (who died in October 1985, age 59), fashion designer Perry Ellis (1986, age 46), Liberace (1987, 67), Robert Mapplethorpe (1989, age 42), actor Ian Charleson (1990, age 40), artist Keith Haring (1990, age 31), Freddie Mercury (1991, age 45), Anthony Perkins (1992, age 60), Rudolf Nureyev (1993, age 54), Leigh Bowery (1994, age 33), Derek Jarman (1994, age 52) and Kenny Everett (1995, age 50) – there were thousands of mostly gay young men in Britain whose lives were cut short by the disease.
‘I lived through a period in the late eighties, early nineties, when there was a whole tsunami of close friends who died from AIDS,’ said artist and film-maker John Maybury, who later became both a collaborator and friend of McQueen’s. ‘I lost twenty close friends in two or three years. Lee’s generation saw this other generation decimated. It was horrific beyond all imagining, but the w
ider society at large chose to ignore it. These kids like Lee were beginning to create their sexual identities at a time when this shadow, this spectre, was hanging over them.’90
Despite the large, bustling household on Biggerstaff Road, and the fun that he had with his straight friends from school, for a great chunk of his adolescence McQueen felt terribly isolated and alone. ‘I didn’t have any gay people to look up to,’ he said later. ‘No gay friends.’91 Lee also had to endure the casual homophobia of his father, a man who would come home after driving his cab around London and joke in front of his son, ‘God, I nearly ran over a bloody queer last night in Soho.’92
Escape was uppermost in Lee’s mind. By the time he left school in June 1985, with one O level – a grade B in art, ‘I had to draw a stupid bowl of fruit,’ he said later – he had made up his mind to try and do something with his life. His resources were limited, he knew that, but he reasoned it was worth a try. ‘It’s not heard of to be a fine artist in an east London family,’ he said. ‘But I always had the mentality that I only had one life and I was going to do what I wanted to.’93
Chapter Two
‘I wanted to learn everything, everything, give me everything’
Lee McQueen
One of the myths surrounding McQueen is that he was a boy prodigy, a kind of Edward Scissorhands who could take a piece of fabric and, with a few manic flashes of his shears, transform it into a fabulous coat, jacket or dress. He was able to bypass the usually obligatory process of sketching out a template or pattern on paper or cardboard; instead, in the words of Mark Lee, the former president of Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci, McQueen had the ability to ‘just take a bolt of fabric and, in front of [your] eyes, would cut the pattern for his clothes’.1 McQueen himself was partly responsible for this perception. ‘I don’t think you can become a good designer, or a great designer, or whatever,’ he said. ‘To me, you just are one. I think to know about colour, proportion, shape, cut, balance is part of a gene.’2
In reality, McQueen’s journey from fashion enthusiast to fashion genius took the best part of seven years. In September 1985 he enrolled at what was then West Ham Technical College in Stratford to take an evening class in art. Later, he recalled that this ‘meant I ended up with housewives and people who just wanted to pass the time. So it wasn’t quite where I wanted to go.’3 According to his sister, Janet, the course involved an element of dressmaking, and by the end of the year he had finished a number of wearable garments, some of which he had made for Janet. One skirt, a simple black tube, was ‘so tight it moulded itself to me and I couldn’t lift my leg to get up the step,’ she said. ‘The other one came apart – he wasn’t very happy when I told him that as he was a bit of a perfectionist.’4
Around this time, Lee started to read McDowell’s Directory of Twentieth Century Fashion, a book that he later regarded as something of a style bible. The guide, first published in 1984, is an A to Z of international fashion, with potted biographies of the twentieth century’s greatest designers. In its opening chapter – entitled ‘Clothes as a Weapon’ – the author, the renowned journalist Colin McDowell, outlined the importance of fashion and its place in history. The words struck a chord with the young McQueen. ‘The more remote fashionable people become, the more powerful and awe-inspiring they seem to the unfashionable majority,’ he wrote. ‘In the past this meant that clothes became not only the trappings of power, but part of the exercise of power itself.’5 Lee read about the connection between fashion and the visual arts, how Dior, Chanel and Schiaparelli ‘were all closely involved with artists, writers and intellectuals’. McDowell went on to explain why fashion is so often wrongly regarded as a somewhat frivolous discipline. The first reason, he said, was visual – unlike objects created by furniture or interior designers, a jacket or a dress ‘loses a great deal of its point when hanging in a wardrobe. It becomes a rounded and convincing creation only when there is a body inside it.’ The other reason why fashion is denigrated is because for a long time it has been seen as the ‘domain of women . . . as feminists see it, men have manipulated women and treated them as objects, frequently using dress as a bait and as a reward. An interest in clothing has become a symbol of suppression. The “little woman” is bought with an expensive dress and by wearing it she feeds a man’s ego. She is telling her friends, by her expensive appearance, how rich and powerful he is to be able to buy and possess such a beautifully caparisoned object.’6 McQueen made it his mission to subvert this attitude: the women who bought his clothes not only earned their own money, but by the very act of wearing McQueen they made a statement to the world that they were not passive objects, but active, and potentially dangerous, subjects.
Lee also started to experiment with photography, an art that always held an allure for him. One photograph, now in the possession of Janet, shows his nephew, Gary, dressed in an oversize overcoat standing next to a wall on which the McQueen boys had daubed their names in white paint.
When Janet – who had trained as a black cab driver like her father – had to work nights, Lee would often babysit for her sons, Paul and Gary. ‘After my dad died he would come over and bring horror films with him to watch,’ said Gary, who later worked at McQueen as a menswear textile designer. ‘I think in the early days his work was definitely influenced by horror. He would chase us around the house and try and hunt us down and say that an old lady lived under our bed. He always had this loud, psychotic laugh. He used to do a lot of sketches as well. I remember a cabbage, a lot of monsters as well as fashion pictures. There was nudism, a lot of flesh on show even then, men and women, as well as a few feathers and birds. He liked to style us a bit as well, used to try and do things with my hair which back then was like a bird’s nest. I always liked him because I have an artistic side; I was always drawing, so we had that in common. I have a darker mind than my brother – I think he used to scare Paul a bit – and so I used to appreciate his sense of humour.’ One day Gary transformed the headboard of his bed into a tombstone, complete with the letters RIP, and waited patiently stretched out with his eyes closed until his grandmother Joyce came into the room. After getting over the initial shock Joyce then gave him ‘a good hiding’.7
Paul recalls how his uncle would creep up the stairs and shout, ‘I’m coming to get you!’ Lee liked to be pampered and would pay his nephew fifty pence to massage his feet. He didn’t bother with fancy lotions – ‘just the sweat from his feet, that was enough,’ he said. At this stage, Paul cannot remember Lee having many friends – ‘he was ostracized by his peers because of the way he was,’ he said.8
During his time at West Ham Technical College, McQueen chose some of his designs to feature in a catwalk show. Today, Janet regrets not attending that event, but ‘looking back none of us thought that Lee was going to become one of the greatest fashion designers of all time’.9 He also earned pocket money by working part-time in a West Ham pie and mash shop.
According to McQueen, one afternoon in 1986 he was at home in Biggerstaff Road when he saw a programme on television about how the art of tailoring was in danger of dying out. There was, said the report, a shortage of apprentice tailors on Savile Row and so his mother said to him, ‘Why don’t you go down there, give it a go?’10 Speaking in 1997, Joyce recalled, ‘He always wanted to be a designer, he always has, [but] when he left school he wasn’t sure what to do. Quite a few of the family were involved in tailoring so I just said to him, “You know, why don’t you go and try?”’11 Spurred on by his mother, Lee took the tube to Bond Street and walked through the smart streets of Mayfair until he came to 30 Savile Row, the headquarters of Anderson & Sheppard. ‘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.12
Anderson & Sheppard was founded in 1906 by Peter or Per Gustaf Anderson, a protégé of Frederick Scholte, who was famous for developing the English drape for the Duke of Windsor, and the trouser cutter Sidney Horat
io Sheppard. ‘A Scholte coat was roomy over the chest and shoulder blades, resulting in a conspicuous but graceful drape,’ wrote one style commentator, ‘the fabric not flawlessly smooth and fitted by gently descending from the collarbone in soft vertical ripples. The upper sleeves, too, were generous, allowing for a broad range of motion, but the armholes, cut high and small, held the coat in place, keeping its collar from separating from the wearer’s neck when he raised his arms. The shoulders remained unpadded, left to slope along the natural lines of the wearer.’
Anderson & Sheppard owed its success to Scholte’s reluctance to cater for celebrity clients, ‘believing them to be undesirable riffraff’. Customers soon included Nöel Coward, Ivor Novello, Cole Porter, Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and Fred Astaire, who it is said would ask for the antique rug in the fitting room to be rolled back so he could feel what it was like to dance in his new suit. Marlene Dietrich was another famous customer – ‘ladies were welcome, provided they wore men’s suits.’13
That day in 1986, Lee, dressed in jeans, a baggy top and looking more than a little dishevelled, walked through the heavy double doors, across the herringbone floor and into the mahogany-panelled room. The contrast between the interior of Biggerstaff Road and the inside of the tall Neoclassical building could not have been more striking, but the overpowering aroma of privilege did not intimidate him. ‘He wasn’t a timid person,’ said John Hitchcock, who started working for the tailor in 1963. Lee told the besuited man standing by the long table piled high with expensive tweeds that he was interested in becoming an apprentice. A moment or so later, Norman Halsey, the head salesman and later managing director, came down to interview him. The handsome older man with his aquiline nose and head of silver hair was an astute judge of character and after talking with the seventeen-year-old boy Halsey offered him a job. The position would not have been well paid and McQueen would have earned only a few thousand pounds a year, probably the equivalent of three Anderson & Sheppard suits. ‘It was obvious when he first came he did not know anything, he was a blank canvas,’ said Hitchcock, who worked as a cutter in the mid-to-late eighties and who is now the managing director.14
Alexander McQueen Page 5
