Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  Lee was assigned Cornelius O’Callaghan as a mentor, a man McQueen described as a ‘master tailor’.15 This strict Irishman, who was known by the name of Con, was regarded as one of the best makers of ‘coats’ (Savile-row speak for jackets) in the business. The hours were fixed – Lee was expected to arrive by 8.30 in the morning and work through until 5 p.m. On his first day he was given a thimble – which he placed on the middle finger of his right hand – a scrap of fabric and a line of thread and shown the basics of padding. ‘New apprentices have to practise doing this [padding] stitch, and they have to keep doing it,’ said John Hitchcock. ‘An apprentice will do thousands and thousands of these stitches and, although it becomes very boring, they have to learn. After doing that for a week, the apprentice might then move on to learn about inside padding, how to canvas the jacket, put the pockets in, and the flaps. It normally takes about two years to learn the simple tasks.’16

  Talking about his time at Anderson & Sheppard, McQueen later remembered it as being quite a romantic interlude. ‘It was like Dickens, sitting cross-legged on a bench and padding lapels and sewing all day – it was nice,’ he said. But again he felt isolated because of his sexuality. ‘It was a weird time for me, because at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, I was going through the situation of coming to terms with my sexuality and I was surrounded by heterosexuals and quite a few homophobic people and every day there would be some sort of remark,’ he said. ‘Downstairs on the shop floor was quite gay but upstairs was full of people from Southend and south London, just like any other apprentice trade, full of lads being laddish. So I was trying to keep my mouth shut most of the time because I’ve got quite a big mouth.’17

  Everyone knew McQueen was gay, according to John Hitchcock, but it was not an issue. ‘There are quite a few in the trade,’ he said. ‘It certainly never bothered me. AIDS frightened people, and a lot of men did get frightened, but it was silly really because you are not what they are after. The funny thing with these people who are gay is that they get on very well with the girls. The girls don’t mind one bit. They think the same. They have their effeminate ways but it doesn’t matter.’

  Hitchcock remembers Lee coming to work every day always dressed in baggy jeans, a thick black or grey roll-neck sweater, with sometimes a checked jacket and Doc Martens. A photograph taken in the workshop at the time shows an awkward-looking Lee wearing a red shirt buttoned up to the collar and snow-washed jeans pulled tight with a belt. He was not, by all accounts, a popular member of staff.

  ‘He came over a bit too intense for me,’ said Derrick Tomlinson, who was an apprentice at the same time as Lee. ‘He always tried to have these intense conversations with me and I wasn’t really up for that. And the two girls, who worked here in the same room, they didn’t get on with him either, there was a clash of personalities with them.’ Was his unpopularity due to the fact he was gay? ‘I didn’t know he was gay, he never talked about it,’ said Derrick. ‘He did behave in a slightly strange way, but I didn’t put it down to him being gay.’

  As they worked, the tailors and apprentices listened to the easy-listening music of Radio 2, but in private Lee was an avid fan of house music. ‘I knew nothing about house music until Lee introduced me to it,’ said Derrick. ‘At the time it was one of the new fad things, acid house, the rave scene.’18

  The goal of every new apprentice tailor is to make what is called a ‘forward’ – a jacket that is nearly complete and ready for a first fitting on a customer. Normally, it would take between four and five years for a new person to learn the necessary skills, but McQueen did this in two. ‘Con taught him well,’ said Hitchcock. ‘Lee was very keen to learn and he had a natural ability.’19

  Rosemarie Bolger, a tailor with the company at that time, recalls Lee as being a quiet, nondescript boy who got on with his work. ‘I actually never knew Alexander McQueen, I knew this kid called Lee,’ she said. ‘He was just one of a succession of kids that didn’t make it as tailors. Some people don’t make it because they are not good enough at sewing, others because they lack the discipline. Lee fell into the category of those people who don’t really intend to make a profession as a tailor because they want to use the training for other things. But at the time I couldn’t see any difference between him and any of the other kids.’20

  If McQueen’s stories of working at Anderson & Sheppard are to be believed, the young apprentice actually did leave his mark behind. ‘When you first start you’re there for three months solid just padding lapels,’ he said later. ‘So you get bored and then you do a bit of scribbling inside the jacket, and you might scrawl an obscenity – like a sixteen-year-old does when it’s bored. But it was just a passing phase. If I’d known it was going to be brought up so many times I don’t think I would ever have mentioned it.’21 During a television interview with Frank Skinner he entertained the audience by expanding on the story. ‘I’m in Savile Row in the top of this old building with a load of old tailors and it’s really boring and it just happened to be Prince Charles’s jacket that I was working on at the time,’ he said. ‘And so I drew this big willy on it, like you do.’22 Another variation on the same theme was that he used a Biro to write the words ‘I am a cunt’ inside the jacket.

  Was this true? John Hitchcock said that McQueen’s boss, Con, ‘was a strong Catholic, he went to church, and if he had seen anything he would have changed the canvas. It was not true.’ According to Hitchcock, when Prince Charles’s valet saw the news about McQueen’s alleged subversive graffiti he contacted Anderson & Sheppard to complain. Hitchcock recalled the jacket in question, slowly unpicked the stitching and opened it up to discover – nothing. ‘What McQueen wanted was publicity to say that he had made jackets for Prince Charles, and he achieved that, but it was our downfall,’ said Hitchcock. ‘It was not a nice thing to do.’23 Rosemarie Bolger is in agreement with her boss. ‘He would not have done that as Con would have had his guts for garters.’24

  But there are many, including Sarah Burton, now the creative director of Alexander McQueen, who believed Lee’s versions of events.25 ‘Of course he did that,’ said his sister Jacqui. ‘If you were supposed to be swimming on the water, he would be under the water. He would do anything to be a rebel. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone, there was no one to impress but himself.’26 Andrew Groves, later Lee’s boyfriend, also suspects that McQueen may well have taken pleasure in leaving his mark on the fabric, a transgressive insignia that served as McQueen’s own coat of arms. ‘Whatever he was doing he could not help but subvert it,’ he said. ‘He always wanted to undermine the idea of authority and the establishment.’27

  After Lee had been working at Anderson & Sheppard for about two years, he started to be late for work or to miss whole days entirely. McQueen’s erratic timekeeping began to interfere with the smooth running of the company – if he didn’t finish a particular task by a certain day it meant that other members of staff could not complete their work on time. ‘It was no good saying his bus was late, as our response would have been to tell him to get up earlier,’ said Hitchcock. ‘Con asked me if I could have a word with him as he really thought his behaviour was not good enough. I told him that he was putting everyone else behind, but he got a bit shirty and left. We didn’t sack him, he just walked out. Later we learnt that his mum had been ill, but if he had told us we would have given him a week off.’28 It was obvious that Lee’s behaviour left behind a rather sour atmosphere at the company: when the journalist Lynn Barber contacted Anderson & Sheppard for a quote about McQueen to include in her Observer profile of the designer in 1996, Norman Halsey replied, ‘A problem is that people bandy our name about but nobody in this building remembers him. He maybe only worked here a few weeks. There’s an army expression I could use if you weren’t a lady – it goes “b******* baffles brains”. You don’t know it? Well, the first syllable of the first word is “bull”.’29

  From Anderson & Sheppard McQueen moved further down Savile Row to Gieves & Hawkes, where he took a job
as a tailoring apprentice. He started work on 11 January 1988 and stayed there for just over a year. ‘I certainly remember him working with us,’ said Robert Gieve in 1997, ‘and sadly we lost his talent – no way were we going to keep him – his mind and nature were inquisitive, never short of asking questions. Why this, why that, why put a cut in a coat here rather than there, to create a chest or create suppression in a waist? All this was very evident from the way he worked and the way he talked.’30

  McQueen claimed he endured a climate of homophobia at Gieves & Hawkes, something that in the end contributed to his decision to leave the company in March 1989. ‘I went straight to the head of Gieves & Hawkes and said the situation had to change,’ he said. ‘And it didn’t, so I left.’31

  He started freelancing for Berman & Nathan, the theatrical costumiers, and worked on productions such as Les Misérables and Miss Saigon. ‘Lee worked on the costumes for Miss Saigon and I worked on the props,’ said Andrew Groves. ‘We didn’t realize this until we met.’32 Although Lee later said he loathed the experience – ‘I was surrounded by complete queens, and I hate the theatre anyway’33 – Groves believes that that short spell working on big-scale productions influenced his catwalk shows. ‘His thinking was like mine – if you are going to do a show it has to be a show. You want people to go away saying, “Wow”, or horrified or repulsed or amazed, not just, “Oh, that’s a nice skirt.”’34

  To supplement his meagre income, McQueen also started working again at Reflections, the pub opposite his old school in Stratford. By this time the pub had changed hands and, according to Archie Reed, a man who would later have a long relationship with McQueen, ‘it was the roughest pub in the East End,’ and a hangout for the Inter City Firm (ICF), the hooligan wing associated with West Ham United. The Krays owned it for a time, and then it reopened as a mixed/gay pub. ‘When that door locked you got scared,’ said Archie. ‘There were fights, sex, everything.’ Archie remembers seeing Lee walking around the pub collecting glasses with his eyes lowered to the ground. ‘I was always fascinated by him because he never looked anybody in the eye,’ he said. ‘Later I asked him why he did this and he said he could see everything that was going on without looking. I also asked him why he worked there and he said, “I was so fascinated by the things that went on there. One minute there would be guys kissing, the next girls kissing, then guy and girl.” There was a helluva lot of crime too and a helluva lot of fights.’35

  After Lee saw a magazine article about the Tokyo-born, London-based designer Koji Tatsuno, he turned up at Tatsuno’s studio looking for a job. His interview outfit comprised a pair of tapered trousers, a leather jacket and a piece of satin tied around his neck. ‘I looked a complete freak,’ he said later.36 Although Tatsuno only employed McQueen as an intern for less than a year, the designer had an enormous influence on the twenty-year-old. Tatsuno, then backed by Yohji Yamamoto, was known for his experimentation, his desire to transform fabric from a state of two-dimensional lifelessness into three-dimensional sculpture. He had run away from home at the age of fourteen and had arrived in London five years later on a buying trip for an antiques dealer. In 1982 he launched his own label, Culture Shock, a name that held a certain allure for McQueen, and Tatsuno’s lack of formal training enabled him to create an aesthetic that was unique. ‘I like to create in a very spontaneous way,’ he said in 1993. ‘The convention is that you start from a flat fabric cut out on a surface, but that, to me, has nothing to do with the body.’ Instead, he taught himself how to mould material on the body to create shapes, an approach that McQueen would later follow.37 ‘His work was based on British tailoring with a mix of avant-garde and I thought, there’s nothing like this in London,’ Lee said.38 McQueen worked for Koji at his studio in Mount Street, Mayfair, and it was there that he learnt the art of cutting without a pattern. ‘We never talked about trends or fashions,’ said Koji. ‘I was fascinated by Savile Row tailoring, as he was, and interested in not just following the tradition, but trying to do something new. My first impression of him was that he was a bit weird. I could tell he was attracted to the dark side of beauty, and it was something I could relate to as well.’39

  It was while McQueen was working for Tatsuno that he met a man who would serve as a fashion educator and gay mentor and who would introduce him into a world of wealth, privilege and culture.

  BillyBoy* is the kind of hyper-real aesthete who seems like he could have stepped from the pages of a decadent novel. Born in Vienna and raised in New York, he was style-obsessed from an early age – at twelve he started to collect vintage Schiaparelli when he found a hat designed by the Italian-born couturier that looked like ‘a crushed clown’s hat with an insect sewn to it’ in a Paris flea market.40 BillyBoy* grew up surrounded by artists, writers and movie stars: Salvador Dalí drew him when he was a child; he first visited Warhol’s Factory when he was only five or six years old; and both Diana Vreeland and Jackie Onassis regarded him as their protégé. His guardian and close friend Bettina Bergery, born Elisabeth Shaw Jones, designed Elsa Schiaparelli’s windows in Paris. One look featured a dressmaker’s dummy that sported a bouquet of flowers for a head, which, according to one commentator, may have been inspired by an incident in the designer’s youth: ‘Schiaparelli’s mother, widely recognized as a very beautiful woman, often criticized Schiaparelli’s appearance as a child. To rectify the situation Schiaparelli planted flower seeds in her mouth, nose and ears to make what she perceived as her ugly face more beautiful and unique, with predictably disastrous results.’41 In her autobiography Schiaparelli wrote of her yearning to ‘have a face covered with flowers like a heavenly garden’.42 The image so appealed to McQueen, a young man who always felt self-conscious about his appearance, that later in his career he would take these words and make them real, sending models down the catwalk with faces covered in flowers or butterflies. ‘He was interested in Schiaparelli as the anarchist, the rebel,’ said BillyBoy*. ‘I told him all about the counter-culture things she did, like the skeleton gown and the lobster dress and he found it fascinating.’43

  The two men – who met in 1989 through mutual friends – were born at the very extremes of the social scale: Lee into a working-class family on a tough council estate in Stratford, while BillyBoy* was raised amongst New York’s intellectual elite, had a private tutor and attended a Montessori school. ‘Lee once took me to see where he lived as a child and I was horrified, I had never seen anything like it,’ said BillyBoy*. ‘Of course, I couldn’t say anything, but I could see where that anger came from. I had probably the same morbid curiosity towards his background as he had towards mine.’44 Lee did not go abroad until he was twenty, whereas BillyBoy* was sent by his parents on the first of three world tours at the age of eight. McQueen felt like his family, particularly his father, always had difficulties accepting his sexuality. But when BillyBoy* was in his early teenage years his mother sat him down and asked him whether he was gay; after telling her that he was, she embraced him and ‘nearly crying said, “Oh, thank God, thank God, I was afraid you might not be; you’d have such a dull life as a straight and straights would NEVER get you at all!”’45

  When BillyBoy* came to London he would usually stay at grand hotels like the Savoy or the Ritz, ‘and we would go out and pub crawl and Lee would come to the Ritz and on the one hand be very impressed and then, on the other, say snide things about the hotel,’ he said. ‘He had a kind of chip on his shoulder. He wanted to succeed, and have privilege and money and fame that other people had, but also he resented them for having it. It was a paradox in his personality I don’t think he resolved. We were like night and day and normally speaking we would not have been friends. I don’t think he liked the background he came from and also resented it. I got the impression that he admired my background, although mine is not a happy story. We related to the pain and anguish of our childhoods.’46

  BillyBoy* was born to two teenage parents – his mother, from a Catholic family, was only fourteen, and his father, who
was Jewish, was fifteen. His birth was considered shameful by both families and as a result he was taken away and placed in an orphanage. ‘It was for very rich, very aristocratic illegitimate children to be secreted away,’ he said. At the age of four he was adopted by an aristocratic Russian family who were living in Manhattan and later learnt that his real parents committed suicide when they were eighteen and nineteen. ‘I was their sole heir, with the stipulated wish I carry their names, both names,’ he said. ‘My adoptive parents, in a conundrum, decided to call me BillyBoy* after a British earl’s family member . . . named Boy, and Billy after Wilhelm (or actually Vylyam) and the other names: Zef Sh’muel Roberto Atlantide. Atlantide because I am a double Pisces. I added the asterisk, of course.’47

  Lee was fascinated by BillyBoy*’s story – the idea of the abandoned child, the gothic orphanage full of the illegitimate children of the wealthy, the joint suicide of his parents, his extraordinarily luxurious lifestyle first in New York and then in Paris, where he moved in the late 1970s. In the French capital, he mixed with ‘everyone and anyone you can mention in art and fashion’, including Marlene Dietrich, Line Vautrin, Diego Giacometti, Bernard Buffet, Hubert de Givenchy, Marc Bohan of Dior, André Courrèges, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexandre de Paris, who cut his hair. When BillyBoy* related incidents from his life – which he later described as ‘a bit like Romeo and Juliet with a dash of Pop Art’ – Lee was transfixed. Even at a young age, McQueen was fascinated by the concept of reinvention, the ability some people had to create themselves anew. BillyBoy* told him how education played a central part in saving his life. ‘My education was the best thing that came out of my childhood. I mean, my adoptive family could have been anyone, and they had the intelligence to give me a very good education instead of making me into one of them,’ he said. ‘I am indebted to my adoptive family for this and in a strange way to my real family, my parents who, literally, died to help me . . . I feel close to them . . . so between their souls, minds and the money, and the fortune of my adoptive parents to give me an unusual education, I turned into myself or rather had an easier time turning into myself.’48