Lee and Réva would also frequent the shop Ad-Hoc – a kind of dressing-up box for the perverse – on the corner of Moor Street and Old Compton Street. Here one could find a costume fit for all fantasies – Ad-Hoc sold bondage trousers, PVC vests, women’s shoes in men’s sizes and its customers were a curious mix of club kids, prostitutes, gay muscle men, drag queens, stylists and designers. ‘One day I was working there and Anna Sui, Marc Jacobs, Steven Meisel and Anita Pallenberg came into the shop and bought a whole load of stuff,’ said Frank Franka, now a New York-based photographer. ‘Another day an elderly man wanted to buy some women’s shoes. He came in and crawled around on all fours.’ Club promoters would drop off fliers for their nights at the shop and as a result Ad-Hoc became a hotspot for information about London’s thriving night-life. ‘A punk revival was happening at the time and this place was the ground zero for that,’ said Frank, who would become an acquaintance of Lee’s.27 The manager of the shop, Eric Rose, who had been brought up in Vancouver but who had been living in London since the late eighties, remembers McQueen from those days when he would drop into Ad-Hoc and look through the packed rails of clothes. Lee liked the Canadian’s quick wit, camp humour and his varied social circle, while Eric was drawn to McQueen’s sense of anarchy. Eric recalls one day when he went with Lee and David Kappo, who used to work in the wig shop in the basement of Ad-Hoc, to a house party in Mayfair in honour of Kylie Minogue. ‘We drank all the booze and then decided to go,’ he said. ‘Lee was like, “It’s shit, we gotta go,” and as we ran down the stairs McQueen pulled the fire alarm. I said, “What are you doing?” and he said, “That party was shit – if we’re not going to have fun no one is.” I thought that was a little bit naughty. He had a fun, who-cares attitude.’28
Often on Friday nights, Lee would meet up with Rebecca Barton at a pizza restaurant near the college in Soho. The friends would take advantage of an Evening Standard offer of two-for-one pizzas – ‘I would be the one who paid full price and he would be the one who paid a penny,’ said Rebecca. It was here one night that Lee told her about the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child. ‘He didn’t tell me in any detail about what went on but I know it wasn’t just a one-off,’ she said. Rebecca remembers that while they were at St Martins Lee organized a surprise birthday party for her at a Soho pub and once he gave her a present of a necklace that he had made and a strange black and white photograph of himself, naked from the waist up, wrapped in what looked like cling film. On the back of the photo he scribbled, ‘To my dearest Becca. Lot of love Lee x.’ ‘He was a complete poppet,’ she said. ‘He was lovely and funny and naughty.’29
He also spent a large amount of time with his friend Tania Wade, who he had met one night in the club SubStation. At the time Tania lived in a nearby flat on Shaftesbury Avenue and at the end of the night she would often invite a legion of young gay men back to her place to sleep the night. ‘There would be all these different boys in rows – one with a pillow case over him, another with a flannel or a tea towel – and Lee was one of them,’ she said. ‘I adored him straight away, he was such good fun.’ Tania introduced him to Maison Bertaux, the patisserie on Greek Street run by her sister Michelle; he would order a fruit cheesecake or an apple Danish and an Earl Grey tea and take his place upstairs at the long banquette. ‘He always wanted to make me clothes and I will never forget the sight of him sitting by his sewing machine,’ said Tania. ‘He was so absorbed, like someone with a mania, like a lunatic. I told him that some of the outfits he had made for me would take five people to help me get into them, and that some of the clothes were unwearable. “You cheeky bloody cow,” he replied.’ Once, when the friends were together, he told her to pass him the material for the dress he wanted to make for her; she could see nothing that was suitable. ‘It turned out that he wanted to use his bedcover made from candlewick,’ she said.30
In October 1991, the fashion students, including Lee, Adele and Rebecca, travelled en masse to Paris to try and blag their way into the shows. ‘For London fashion students, sneaking into the shows is a rite of passage,’ said fashion writer Marion Hume. ‘Students from Central St Martins . . . are masters of it.’31 They travelled by train and ferry and stayed in a cheap hotel with the plaster falling off the walls. Rebecca had already secured tickets for the Givenchy show, which she remembers as being full of ‘horrible dresses with floral designs’. Lee was not impressed either. ‘I can’t believe you’ve made me go to this show,’ he told her. ‘It’s really crap. I would never design for a place like this.’ Five years later, when Rebecca heard the news of McQueen’s appointment at Givenchy, the memory made her smile.32
In Paris, Lee dared fellow student Adele Clough to try and talk her way into the Helmut Lang show by pretending to be a model. The trick worked – some of the booked models had been taken ill and Lang’s team had had to call in some more girls. Suddenly, Adele, who was wearing a Gigli suit, felt terrified at the prospect of continuing the charade and the thought of walking down a catwalk and so she hid in the toilets while she considered her options. ‘Then I came out and found that on the chairs were all these spare tickets so I took them, went outside and gave them to Lee and the rest of the group,’ she said. Buoyed on by her success, Lee persuaded Adele to try the same trick again, at a show managed by PR consultant Lynne Franks. But on this occasion the security was tighter and the organizers had photographs of each of the models they had booked. Lee did not give in, however, and he came up with another plan: he told Adele that she had to pretend she was working with stylist Edward Enninful. ‘Lee briefed me about Enninful, what he thought he knew about him, and I duly repeated all this to Lynne Franks, who asked me to describe what he looked like,’ said Adele. ‘But then Lynne turned around and said, “Did you not think to mention that he is black?” I realized Lee had made it all up.’33
When the students arrived back in London, Bobby Hillson asked them about what museums they had seen in Paris. ‘We didn’t go to a single exhibition or do a single drawing, we just had a really good time,’ said Rebecca. The news did not please Bobby and she told her students what she thought of them. This ticking off was nothing compared to the force with which Louise Wilson expressed her opinions. Her speech was frequently peppered with ‘fucks’ and she would, in the words of one commentator, ‘dropkick a mannequin at any student dropping their stitches’.34
From the beginning of the course McQueen and Louise Wilson had a difficult relationship. Lee accepted criticism when he believed it was warranted, such as the occasion when Wilson pointed out that ‘he put these beads between organza and I remember at the time saying that he had knocked them off, that he had got that idea from Callaghan’.35 But then, as the course progressed and Louise took over the job as director, the relationship worsened. ‘He had many clashes with Louise, because they were actually quite similar; they were both control freaks,’ said Réva.36
One project involved designing an outfit for Dame Shirley Porter, the Lord Mayor of Westminster, but Lee refused to take part because ‘he said he wasn’t going to make clothes for anyone who was privileged and who wasn’t prepared to pay for them’. Although Louise subsequently admitted that she could be brutally honest, McQueen felt that at times he was being bullied by her. ‘If she could have got rid of Lee she would have got rid of him,’ said Adele. ‘He could do his work in two minutes. He could sketch a pattern by eye. And the pattern tutor would tell him it was not good enough, but then he would make the toile and it would fit perfectly the person it was made for. But still they would say you’ve done it the wrong way. I think they were jealous of his talent. But Lee always knew he would be a success – there was never an unwavering doubt in his mind.’
At one point, Lee lashed out at Louise Wilson and, in front of a group of students, said, ‘How can you possibly know what women want to wear when you are so fat?’ From that moment onwards the attacks became more personal. ‘Lee was always hatching plans for the downfall of Louise,’ said Adele. At one point he broug
ht in a whoopee cushion and put it on her chair.37 Lee still felt incredibly loyal towards Bobby, the woman who had taken him onto the course because she had recognized his raw talent, and he felt protective towards her. ‘Lee did have a tough time under Louise Wilson,’ said Bobby, ‘but I didn’t know it at the time. It only came out later when I heard that Lee had said, “Louise did nothing for me, it was all Bobby.”’38
During the course, Lee had become increasingly interested in drawing inspiration from the dark side. According to Rebecca Barton, he became obsessed by Burke and Hare, the Irish immigrants who carried out a series of murders in Edinburgh at the beginning of the nineteenth century and who sold sixteen corpses to a doctor to be dissected. At the same time he also read Perfume, Patrick Suskind’s bestselling novel about a perfume apprentice in eighteenth-century France who goes on to murder virgins in his quest to find the ‘perfect scent’. ‘The character in that book is him,’ said Rebecca, ‘all visceral with all his senses heightened. He liked nasty rawness, but of course he balanced that with complete beauty.’39
Lee told friends that his family was related to Jack the Ripper. His interest in the Victorian serial killer intensified after seeing the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. McQueen became fixated on the character of Buffalo Bill, a psychopathic tailor who kills women in order to fashion a suit made from their skin. ‘The idea of these women being sewn into an outfit was a huge inspiration for him,’ said Réva, who saw the film with him. ‘And also the image of butterflies or moths being encased inside the fabric, you could see that later in one of his collections.’
Réva worked beside McQueen as they started to plan their final collections. Lee started the process by sketching, but the design would quickly change and evolve as he made the dress. ‘He would start with the collar line with a very tailored, very tight-fitting collar,’ he said. ‘And then very tight sleeves. If you look at those catalogues of old Victorian costume you see these very corseted tailored women’s coats. He had this book on his desk about Victorian costume, a huge reference book. And he would go through it and show me the capes, he always liked the capes.’40
Lee turned to Simon Ungless to help him with preparations for his final show. For the whole of his second year, McQueen had been spending increasing amounts of time with Simon in the print room, learning about techniques such as dip-dyeing and tie-dyeing. For one of his designs, a frock coat, Lee used a barbed thorn pattern that Simon had printed onto pink silk. ‘I worked with Lee on some of those pieces,’ recalls Simon. ‘I remember the day, it was just me and Lee in the studio and he was working on the toile for the jacket with the peplum that stuck out at a 90-degree angle, and I was concentrating on some rubber pieces, trying to work out a way of sewing them together. Neither of us knew how these things were going to work and Ike Rust, who was then a visiting lecturer, came into the studio and asked, “How are these things going to work?” Lee and I looked at him and said, “Well, we don’t know,” and he said, “You two are completely mental,” and walked off.’41
In the run-up to the show Lee wrote a letter to Simon Costin, whose jewellery and body sculpture he had seen featured in the pages of magazines like The Face and i-D, asking if he could use some of his pieces in his collection. The two men met and Costin, who would go on to work with Lee as a set designer and art director on a number of shows, lent him seven pieces, including two large necklaces made from bird skulls. ‘He was always interested in the iconography of death,’ said Costin. ‘And we shared a similar sensibility, as both of us were fascinated by the macabre. Yet the first time I met him I kept thinking of Billy Bunter. Lee was so playful and funny and raucous and foul-mouthed, and he had this passion for what he was doing.’42
When McQueen had finished the clothes, described as ‘day into evening wear inspired by nineteenth-century street walkers’,43 John McKitterick came into the college to view them on a rack. He was amazed by what he saw. ‘What I distinctly remember is that if you looked at the collection from the side rather than from the front you saw this extraordinary silhouette, a bird-like silhouette,’ he said. ‘McQueen always said he loved birds, but there was something else to it, too. The idea of dropping the waist and making the legs shorter was quite homoerotic in a way.’ McKitterick was reminded of the sexualized images of Touko Laaksonen, the illustrator known as Tom of Finland, who drew men ‘with little stumpy legs, narrow waists and longer torsos’. McQueen ‘used these masculine elements and made this sexy for a girl’. McKitterick also remembers thinking how St Martins had given Lee a new confidence. ‘That institution really changed him,’ he said. ‘He became more knowledgeable and had a confidence about what he was talking about. He realized he was far more talented than the majority of people there. He began to be able to talk about the world, fashion and current events. He was a different person. St Martins gave him the thing he was looking for.’44
On the day of the final show, in March 1992, Lee and Simon Ungless left Simon’s house in Tooting and made their way to Chelsea, where the event was to be held in the barracks on the King’s Road. The atmosphere was tense and chaotic as there was a great deal left to do. After finishing backstage, the friends went to find Louise Wilson, as Lee wanted to check a last-minute detail with her. ‘And she just took out her perfume from her bag and sprayed it in his face, and yelled, “You fucking stink”,’ recalls Simon. ‘Lee fell on the floor and said, “God, you’re a fucking cunt.”’45
As the audience began to take their seats they had little idea of the toxic interchange that had just taken place. The lights dimmed and the show started. Lee’s mother Joyce and her sister-in-law Renee, who were sitting in the audience, enjoyed the spectacle, the parade of models and designs, but it wasn’t until the words ‘Lee A-McQueen’ were projected onto the back wall that they began to feel totally engaged. After all, both women knew how far Lee had come to get to this point. ‘To me at that time that was the pinnacle, seeing him at his MA show,’ said Joyce in 1997.46 A heavy beat began to pump out from the speakers as the models sashayed down the runway. Lee presented ten looks in total, including a black silk peplum jacket paired with a tight red skirt; a pink silk thorn print jacket with black trousers and a black bustier top; and a calico skirt covered in papier-mâché magazine articles and burn marks which was twinned with a black jacket with fantastically long, pointed lapels.
Sewn into the designs and also encased in small pockets of Perspex attached to the fabric were locks of McQueen’s own hair, sometimes strands of his pubic hair. The front page of his market report – a document that was supposed to be an in-depth analysis outlining the background to the collection – was in Lee’s case ‘all about his mother as a genealogist and Jack the Ripper . . . and it had his pubic hair scattered on the cover’.47 Later, McQueen tried to explain the decision to incorporate hair into the clothes. ‘The inspiration behind the hair came from Victorian times when prostitutes would sell theirs for kits of hair locks, which were bought by people to give to their lovers,’ he said. ‘I used it as my signature label with locks of hair in Perspex. In the early collections it was my own hair; it was about me giving myself to the collection.’48
McQueen had named his collection Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims. On one level he cast himself as a kind of stylistic serial killer figure slashing and cutting up cloth to refashion the female silhouette into a form that was more aesthetically pleasing. But the incorporation of his own hair into the clothes also symbolized his emotional identification with the victims. There was something sweetly romantic about the gesture, too. As McQueen stated, in Victorian times prostitutes would sell their locks out of economic necessity to people who then gave the hair as tokens of affection. McQueen had a hope that the same narrative of romance would infuse his own life and that he could move away from the ugly realities of exploitation and abuse to something sweeter and gentler, more equal. To him, this talisman of a lock of hair sewn into those clothes meant that he believed in the p
ossibility that one day he would be transformed by the power of love.
McQueen had invested so much energy, both physical and emotional, into that collection that he hoped that he would be awarded the finale – the honour of showing his clothes last – but instead this went to a student named Kei Kagami. At that time Louise Wilson favoured Japanese-influenced design; later she told Réva that she had also given the Tokyo-born designer the prestigious slot because ‘he was much better organized than the rest of us, everything was finished and perfect’, said Réva. ‘But Lee was actually very upset he didn’t get the finale because he thought he deserved it.’49 There were others there that day who also believed Lee should have been given the top award. ‘He was a stand-out student, you could tell right from the beginning that he was marvellous,’ said Lesley Goring, who produced the show.50 Bobby Hillson recalls being slightly disappointed by his degree show, ‘but looking back I think I was wrong’.51 Lee left St Martins not with a distinction, but with a pass ‘like everyone else’.52
The next day, Lee and Rebecca were in college sitting in the corridor down from Bobby Hillson’s room when a call came into the office from Isabella Blow. The influential stylist, who then worked at British Vogue, had been in the audience and had been mesmerized by McQueen’s collection to such an extent that she wanted to come into the college to take a closer look. ‘I was sitting on the floor, I couldn’t even get a seat at the St Martins show, and the pieces went past me and they moved in a way I had never seen and I wanted them,’ she said later. ‘The colours were very extreme. He would do a black coat, but then he’d line it with human hair and it was blood red inside so it was like a body – like the flesh, with blood. And I just thought, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I just knew he had something really special, very modern, it was about sabotage and tradition.’53 When Rebecca heard the news of Blow’s interest she turned to her friend and said, ‘You’re going to be really famous’, a comment Lee laughed off. ‘You could see in his face that he was really excited,’ said Rebecca. ‘And everything changed overnight.’54
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