The two men also bonded over their shared love of fashion. BillyBoy*, who is now an artist, remembers some of the exquisite clothes Lee created while he was employed by Koji Tatsuno. He still wears a couple of gorgeous items made by McQueen from that time: a coat fashioned from woven peacock feathers and another inspired by an eighteenth-century riding jacket which he said ‘is a masterpiece of design that I could wear for the rest of my life’.49
One day, when BillyBoy* came into Tatsuno’s Mayfair studio to buy some show samples, Lee watched as he tried on a tight, ‘much too low-cut silk dress’.
‘You should wear that, only you can wear that,’ Lee said to him.
‘Don’t you think it makes me look a bit like a slut, a tranny slut?’ asked BillyBoy*.
‘No, looks like you have balls,’ he replied.
‘You mean nerve?’
‘Yeah, that too,’ he said, laughing.50
McQueen was also intrigued to see how his new friend would change his look: one day BillyBoy* would be wearing a smart, traditional suit from Anderson & Sheppard, the next a surreal avant-garde outfit that was designed to challenge and unsettle. Lee was ‘impressed I think at first by the fact I was a strange hybrid between highbrow and lowbrow and that I could wear traditional suits and ties and also John Galliano’s first clothes or the weird stuff from BodyMap.’51
Although Lee was not, in BillyBoy*’s opinion, a very talented draftsman – ‘he used to do these little midgety sketches on the corners of paper plates and napkins’ – he had a seemingly innate sense of cut. ‘He had this talent to be able to make both pattern pieces and do draping or moulage, where you take the cloth, pin it on the mannequin and cut and create and mould around the body form. He had an ability that was flabbergasting.’52
When Koji Tatsuno’s business went bankrupt in 1989 McQueen started to look for new work. He asked a female colleague at the company if she knew of anyone who needed a pattern cutter and she put him in touch with John McKitterick, the head designer of Red or Dead, the street fashion brand created by Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway. ‘Lee was very unassuming and didn’t look like he was interested in fashion whatsoever,’ said McKitterick. ‘He was very unworldly, a bit scruffy-looking, but when he came to work at the studio, which was then in Wembley, it was obvious that he knew what he was doing. He could sew and cut very well, which was surprising in someone so young, and he was very organized and always on time. We became very friendly, but we were not friends at this point. I didn’t see him outside of the studio and he didn’t frequent any of the places, bars or events that I went to. I liked him, he was a very pleasant guy, but he didn’t know how to have a conversation. He was a little worker bee, and he did it very well. But I didn’t realize he was interesting; that came later.’
During this time Lee worked with McKitterick on a number of collections for Red or Dead, including Charlie Spirograph (Autumn/Winter 1989), Spacebaby (Spring/Summer 1990) and We Love Animals (Autumn/Winter 1990). The more Lee learnt about the intricacies of design the more he became intrigued and, as he worked, he began to ask John specific questions relating to the technical aspects of the fashion process. ‘He started to think that actually what he wanted to do was get into the fashion industry,’ said McKitterick. ‘I don’t think he knew at what level. Out of this conversation came an idea, a suggestion that he should go to Italy. I had worked in Italy, and at that point, in the late eighties, it was a great place to get into the business. There were lots of new avenues there, such as sportswear and menswear, which at that time you didn’t get in Paris or the States.’
Lee, with a spontaneity that never left him, wanted to fly to Italy immediately, but John told him to wait – the best time to get a job was directly after the shows when the head designers would be looking to refresh their studios. John also opened his contacts book, and gave him a list of names – editors, headhunters, agencies, designers. Armed with this information, Lee went to see his sister Tracy, who then worked for a travel agency and who booked him a one-way ticket to Milan. ‘I thought he was a little crazy,’ said John McKitterick. ‘He stood there in his baggy jeans with a hole in the knee and a baggy shirt and dreadful hair and dreadful everything. I thought, “What’s he doing?”’53
McQueen, who was nearly twenty-one, arrived in Italy’s fashion capital in March 1990 armed with a plan. Although he was prepared to work for any designer, at the top of his list was one name: Romeo Gigli. ‘There was nothing going on in London, and the biggest thing at that time was Romeo Gigli, he was everywhere,’ said Lee.54 In McDowell’s Directory of Twentieth Century Fashion, Colin McDowell wrote of Gigli, ‘His unstructured clothes with their emphasis on an elongated silhouette soon made him stand out from mainstream Italian fashion . . . Gigli’s shows have become cult affairs and his clothes are eagerly bought by wealthy young women world-wide. His designs are a synthesis of London post-punk street fashion and Japanese avant-garde style presented with Italian refinement and colour to produce clothes of extreme subtlety and elegance . . . Many fashion experts consider him the most important designer to have appeared in the eighties.’55 McQueen was drawn to Gigli’s spirit of romanticism, the references to Byzantine mosaics and medieval reliefs, and his ability to stage shows that prompted a strong emotional reaction – at the end of his 1989 Paris debut fashion editors ‘nearly lost their head wraps and oversize eyeglasses as they sprang out of their seats at the show’s end’.56 Bianca Jagger described Gigli’s appeal in 1989 – he was, she said, ‘the most exciting designer I have seen in a long time because he makes women wear men’s clothes with a great deal of femininity’.57
That day in Milan, McQueen – dressed in a pair of seventies-style patchwork flares and a checked shirt – made his way from the Porta Garibaldi metro stop down Corso Como to Gigli’s studio. He did not have an appointment, but he hoped that his ‘book’ – which he later said was the ‘worst portfolio’ ever, ‘full of costume design’58 – would secure him a job as a pattern cutter. The receptionist called up Lise Strathdee, a New Zealander who had trained in fashion and textile design at the Istituto Marangoni and who was then working as ‘Romeo’s right hand’, and she came down to meet him. ‘I don’t remember what images were in his book, what interested me was his work experience . . . an unusual mix which I thought might be of interest to Romeo,’ she said. ‘That morning Romeo was in a meeting with Carla [Sozzani, his partner and sister of Franca Sozzani, editor of Italian Vogue] and although we worked in an open studio you would not interrupt meetings.’ Lise remembers that Lee ‘spoke quite softly and was probably quite nervous. We sat down and as I looked through his book I got Lee to talk and asked him questions . . . I got the impression that he wanted to get out of London and try his luck in Milan.’
After flicking through his book, Lise took his contact details and thanked Lee for coming in. As she said goodbye she could sense his disappointment, but then as she returned to her table she saw that Romeo had finished his meeting. She went up to him and told him about the young man with Savile Row experience that she had just met. ‘Romeo had a few minutes before his next meeting so he said yeah, he’d see him,’ said Lise. ‘So I tore out of the building and turned right down Corso Como and legged it towards the Porta Garibaldi metro stop searching for him.’59 Catching a glimpse of Lee going down the steps into the station, Lise yelled out to him. Later, McQueen recalled the moment when Gigli’s ‘assistant came running after me like a madwoman saying Romeo wanted to see me’.60 When Lise told Lee that her boss would see him but that he didn’t have much time and that they would have to be quick, ‘his face was like the sun coming out, warm and happy and [he was] chatty and laughing . . . So we half-walked, half-ran back, chatting excitedly, laughing. Back inside the studio I took him to Romeo’s desk and introduced them. I can’t remember if I stayed there with them during the meeting or not, but anyway he got hired on the spot.’61 The salary was small – around 1.2 million lire a month (the equivalent price of a simple shirt at the store) – bu
t Lee was thrilled. He called John McKitterick to tell him the news, who was ‘astonished, a little shocked, but pleased’ for him.62
McQueen split his time between Zamasport, the factory in Novara situated thirty miles outside Milan, and the studio, an ‘airy, white-washed space’ situated in a loft above ‘an auto-body shop’ on Corso Como, a street described at the time as ‘decidedly dowdy’.63 Lee started working on clothes for Callaghan, another label that Gigli designed for, and one of his first tasks was to try to replicate a pleat in a shirt that Romeo had spotted in a photograph. The image, taken by Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka, showed a young gypsy whose shirt was being pulled by another boy. ‘Lee worked for a week on that shirt, but he never accomplished the pattern,’ said Carmen Artigas, one of Gigli’s design assistants at the time. ‘Romeo came in and said, “No, it’s not like that,” and it was embarrassing, disappointing. I remember Lee sweating and being very nervous as Romeo spoke to him that day.’ Six years later, when Carmen visited McQueen in London, Lee brought out a plastic folder which contained a copy of the same photograph of the gypsy boy. ‘Remember this?’ he said to her. ‘I thought I was going to get fired that day.’
The two became friends after Carmen, who was born in Mexico City, noticed that Lee seemed to be in pain; he held his cheek as if the skin was tender to touch and so she offered him an aspirin. Later that week, the two design assistants had lunch and Lee told her about his life growing up in Stratford. ‘When he looked at you he had piercing blue eyes,’ she said. ‘He was shy and had a kind heart. He was a good person. I got the impression he was not out of the closet. He wore loose jeans and loose shirts, a pocket chain, he looked like a street guy. And his teeth were in bad shape, he was self-conscious about that.’ Lee also suffered from gingivitis – Carmen noticed that his gums were swollen and bright pink. ‘And he had a tooth missing – you wouldn’t notice if he spoke, but if he threw his head back and laughed you could see it.’
One of Lee and Carmen’s tasks was to draw small sketches of the forthcoming collection on swathes of vellum paper which then would be used to wrap Gigli’s designs. In order to entertain – and perhaps shock – his new friend, McQueen started to pass a series of drawings across the table, sketches that would foreshadow the imagery of his later collections. One was of a hybrid figure, half-woman, half-mermaid; her head, or what remained of it, was veiled, while her breasts were adorned with metallic cones and piercing her stomach was an arrow. Another showed an aggressive-looking dog next to an exotic, mythical bird. McQueen would sign his sketches, ‘Carmen with love, Lee’, but at times she found it puzzling. ‘The collections at the time were very Pre-Raphaelite, all about beautiful women, and here was this guy sketching monsters,’ she said. ‘I thought, “What is going on with this guy?”’64
Lee moved into a room in Lise’s four-bedroom flat at Via Ariberto 1, near the Sant’Agostino metro. The apartment was in a palazzo signorile, a ‘big place with tiled floors and wooden parquet [and] high ceilings’ in ‘an anonymous, quite grand part of town’. When he left or entered the building Lee would often see an old couple sitting inside the concierge cubicle; the man had respiratory problems and would attach himself to a breathing apparatus, an image that Lise believes may have partly inspired the disturbing tableau of the overweight naked woman wearing a mask and breathing through a tube that played a central part in Voss, McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2001 show. ‘You might come home one day and walk past the glass box, all framed in dark wood, on your way to get to the elevator or go up the stairs to the flat and you’d see these two ancient people sitting side by side with a small table between them,’ said Lise. ‘He [would be] wearing a white singlet, hairy on his arms, and his face half-hidden by being hooked up to the apparatus and they would both just stare out ahead out of the glass and through you. A pungent sulphur smell emanating from the glass and their blank expressions in a semi-darkness. [It was] just eerie.’
As well as Lise, his flatmates included Gigli colleagues Karen Brennan and Frans Ankoné. ‘Lee introduced me to De La Soul, blaring from a ghetto blaster in his room,’ said Lise. ‘He had a very “London” energy and when he was in the house I was sort of in London. But he wasn’t at home much or maybe I wasn’t. We were working ten- to twelve-hour days, maybe going out to dinner, maybe dancing and then the next morning it’s one bathroom to four bedrooms so we’re all in and out the door. [I remember] the occasional banging on the bathroom door, “Come on – I need the bathroom!” type stuff.’ She also recalls being horrified by some of the food that McQueen attempted to cook. ‘He didn’t seem to know the first thing about cooking,’ she said. ‘So I made him at least one or maybe a few meals after that and insisted he eat them, probably just pasta, but I would have hassled him about eating well.’ Years later, when the two met up again in London, Lee called her his ‘Italian mamma’, ‘which he must have intended as a compliment’.
One night in the flat at Via Ariberto, Lise, Karen, Frans and Lee were having dinner when Lee made some ‘odd’ remark about homosexuality, a quip that Lise initially regarded as homophobic. ‘I thought he was being insensitive and/or ignorant,’ she said. Nobody commented on the remark and the conversation moved on as Frans started to talk about new clubs in Milan, ‘and Lee rattled out all these names of gay clubs’, details of which ‘you could only know about if you frequented them or had lived in Milan for some time . . . [it was a] connoisseur’s list of gay clubs in Milan.’ Lise remembers there being a slightly awkward, embarrassing moment before the conversation shifted gear again, but she was left thinking to herself, ‘Hello? You must know a thing or two then,’ but Lee carried on sitting there at the kitchen table, his head bowed slightly, ‘not looking at anyone’. She realized then that ‘there was way more to Lee than he let on’.65 Later, Lee would regale his St Martins friend Simon Ungless with stories about his sex life in Italy, stories Ungless assumed were fabrications. ‘He talked about doing things that were absolutely physically impossible,’ said Simon. ‘Really ridiculous things about being in some kind of hoist and being lowered onto way too many men at once.’66
There were others who were also surprised by McQueen’s behaviour. One weekend Lee invited Carmen and her sister, who was visiting Milan, to a party. They arranged to meet at a street corner outside a restaurant and, as it was raining, Lee turned up holding a beautiful vintage Japanese parasol made from bamboo and waxed paper. ‘He destroyed the parasol, which belonged to a Japanese friend of his, because it was, of course, not meant to be used in the rain,’ said Carmen. When she mentioned this to him, Lee just laughed and they continued to the party. There, her preconceptions of Lee were challenged once more. ‘The host was a handsome man who was working for Versace and the party was full of good-looking people,’ she said. ‘I wondered where did he meet all these guys?’67
Determined to observe and learn as much as possible from those around him, McQueen kept a close eye on the charismatic Romeo Gigli, described by Carmen as being ‘like a hologram . . . he was not a good-looking man, but he had something, a special, mysterious, romantic quality’.68 Lee was intrigued by Gigli’s story: born into a wealthy family, Romeo lost both his parents when he was a teenager and, with his inheritance, travelled the world. ‘I lived like a prince for at least ten years,’ Gigli said. His mother had always worn haute couture (Dior and Balenciaga) and Gigli became fascinated by the structure of these exquisite items of clothing, some of which appeared to be moving pieces of sculpture. ‘I paid attention to how things were made,’ he said. ‘Whatever I do, I must know how it works.’ Eclecticism lay at the heart of his creative process, drawing inspiration from books, paintings, foreign cultures, travel. ‘My collection is inspired by the library of my father,’ he said, ‘never one trend but a big melange – a miscellany of my knowledge.’69
McQueen also learnt from Gigli how to construct and maintain a public image. ‘Gigli had all this attention and I wanted to know why,’ Lee said later. ‘It had very little to do with the clo
thes and more to do with him as a person. And that’s fundamentally true of anybody. Any interest in the clothes is secondary to the interest in the designer. You need to know that you’re a good designer as well, though. You can’t give that sort of bullshit without having a back-up. If you can’t design, what’s the point of generating all that hype in the first place?’70
Towards the end of his time in Milan, Lee had a falling-out with some of his flatmates at Via Ariberto. Lise returned one night to find the apartment dark and in silence. She opened the door to her room to find Lee lying on her bed, with his feet on her pillow. Lee was ‘pretty upset’ as he related to her what had happened ‘amidst teary sobs’. She recalls, ‘It was late. I was tired. I consoled him as best I could, got him off my bed and down the corridor into his own bed. Soon after he packed up and left.’ Lise was left with the image of the ‘front door left banging wide open into the dark palazzo stairwell’.71
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