Chapter Four
‘We’d embarked on this adventure, like travelling on this chariot, Boudica-like’
Detmar Blow
Isabella Blow, wearing a pair of black-fringed Gaultier trousers, came strutting and squawking into the ramshackle St Martins building looking for the student who she later said had ‘a great technical ability to . . . make clothes fly’.1 She hurried up to the second floor and introduced herself to a rather startled-looking Lee. His reaction was not unusual: after all, one commentator described Isabella as looking like ‘a piece of public art’,2 while another compared her to ‘Rod Hull’s emu as styled by Salvador Dalí’.3 ‘He didn’t know who she was and at this stage didn’t really trust her,’ said Réva Mivasagar, who witnessed that first meeting. ‘She kept saying she wanted to buy his collection, but he was very sceptical about it all, whether she would really buy it. She was very flamboyant about who she knew, all her connections, and Lee thought she was pretty crazy.’4
Blow persisted, however, and continued to pester both him and his mother, whose number Lee had given her and who she repeatedly telephoned. ‘Who is this loony lady calling?’ Joyce asked her son, who was still living at home.5 Finally, after a great deal of persuasion, Lee named a price of a couple of hundred pounds per outfit, and although Isabella said she could not afford to give him the whole sum all at once – ‘money simply passed through her fingers like sand’6 – she said she would pay him by instalments. Over the course of the next few months, Lee would accompany her to various cash points around London as she withdrew money from the bank and he would hand over the clothes stashed in black bin liners in exchange. Although Lee was wary of her at first the more he learnt about her the more he realized how potentially useful she could be to him. She told him about her experience at American Vogue with Anna Wintour, at Tatler with style supremo Michael Roberts and at British Vogue with Liz Tilberis. She had been friends with Andy Warhol – she had worn a Bill Blass black suit for the artist’s memorial service and had done a striptease at the party afterwards – had lived with Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg in New York, and had known Rupert Everett for years. But the bond between McQueen and Blow went much deeper than a simple patron–artist relationship. As Lee learnt more about her past – something she talked about with the same nonchalance with which she would flash her breasts – he discovered that, for all her upper-class privileges, she was just as damaged as him.
Isabella’s widower, Detmar Blow, has described her early life as a ‘black fairy story’.7 In 1964, when Issie was five years old, she was playing in the gardens of the family’s home, Doddington Park, Cheshire, with her brother Johnny, who was two and a half. Her mother, Helen, told her daughter to look after her brother while she went into the house, but something distracted the little girl and in those few seconds it seems that Johnny, who was the heir to a baronetcy dating back to 1660, choked on a piece of dry biscuit and fell into a small pond and died. Later, Isabella would claim that her mother had gone inside to put on her lipstick. ‘That explains my obsession with lipstick,’ she would say.8 McQueen was also fascinated to hear about Isabella’s grandfather, Sir Jock Delves Broughton, who had been tried but acquitted of the murder of his second wife’s lover, Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, in Kenya’s Happy Valley, a scandal that was detailed in James Fox’s book White Mischief. In 1942, Jock committed suicide by injecting himself with morphine at an hotel in Liverpool.
Lee, whose gothic sensibilities ran through his veins like black blood, found Issie’s outlandish digressions darkly compelling. Some anecdotes – such as the one about her grandmother, Vera, who unwittingly ate human flesh on a trip to Papua New Guinea – were undoubtedly amusing. There were other stories, however, that had the potency to haunt the living: Detmar’s father, Jonathan Blow, had committed suicide in 1977 by drinking a bottle of the weedkiller paraquat. Jonathan’s twelve-year-old son, Amaury, witnessed the death. ‘He said Dadda never cried out, but that his fists were clenched in pain,’ said Detmar.9 Isabella would choose the same method to end her life when she killed herself in May 2007.
Isabella also told her new friend of her love of beauty, a compulsion to disguise and arm herself by means of the transformative power of fashion. Like McQueen she hated how she looked – she described her face as ‘ugly’ – and felt self-conscious about her ‘bucked front teeth’, which she called ‘her combine harvesters’.10 Although she went to see a celebrity dentist in New York in the eighties to see if he could do anything about them she was told that she had left it too late. ‘Her habit of smearing her lips and teeth with lipstick was in part to deal with this perceived disfigurement,’ said Detmar. ‘Her hatred of her face was another demon Issie carried with her for life.’11
Detmar remembers the first time his wife spoke about McQueen. She came rushing home after the St Martins show and told her husband about the boy ‘who could cut like a god’.12 Despite the occasional couple of hundred pounds from Issie and the cash he received from the Department of Social Security (DSS), McQueen did not have enough money to rent his own flat. He was desperate to leave home and so Isabella offered him the use of 33 Alderney Street, Pimlico, a tall Victorian terraced house owned by Detmar’s mother, Helga. Soon after graduation, Lee moved there with Réva Mivasagar. ‘Isabella wanted him to have the house so that he could work on her look, on her clothes,’ said Réva. ‘She absolutely adored his work, he couldn’t do anything wrong. He was very excited about starting out on his own and he was experiencing a creative high.’13 From the beginning, Isabella called McQueen by his middle name as she thought it sounded grander and 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.14
McQueen also began to assist Isabella on shoots. One day that summer he came to John McKitterick’s studio and asked to borrow some clothes, a couple of leather pieces with zips and rivets. ‘He borrowed these on a Tuesday and on the Friday night I was in a gay bar in south London with a friend and who should walk in all dressed in my clothes but Lee,’ said John. ‘His hair looked all slick and he had made a little leather bow tie. To see Lee dressed like that was hysterical – he had never had access to clothes like this before – and my friend and I looked at each other. Lee saw me and his face went red, he was embarrassed, but we ended up laughing about it together.’15
With Réva, Lee continued to explore London’s night life. One of his favourite clubs at this time was Kinky Gerlinky, created by Gerlinde and Michael Kostiff, which was then held at the Empire in Leicester Square.
The club, which began in the mid-eighties after the closure of the legendary Taboo, developed a reputation for ‘polymorphous perversity’, a term that was coined by Freud to mean the ability to derive erotic pleasure from any part of the body but which, by the early nineties, encapsulated the trend of freeform sexuality. Kinky Gerlinky was a space where misfits of all sorts could go to express their difference. ‘It’s a gay club, and it’s a massive gay club, it’s got about 3,000 people in it,’ said MC Kinky. ‘But they don’t just cater for gay people, they cater for everything and there aren’t really any restrictions . . . you can do what you want, say what you want, get up to what you want.’16
Dressing up was a requirement, the more bizarre the better. Porn star Aiden Shaw, who went on to enjoy a close relationship with McQueen, once went dressed as Minnie Mouse. Fashion journalist Hamish Bowles, now at American Vogue, transformed himself into a 1940s-style Hollywood goddess. ‘I always think it’s always very good to really go for an icon, do it slavishly,’ he said.17 ‘Kinky Gerlinky was a big deal for Lee,’ said Réva. ‘Once I remember him wearing a hat from [milliner] Philip Treacy, which looked like a pair of ram horns but had been made from organza, and he borrowed a silver lamé frock coat that I think was John Gallian
o. He made his own pants using the fabric left over from the student collection and wore them with some shoes from Isabella. The look was pseudo-drag.’18
Later, McQueen and Treacy would become both friends and creative collaborators, but at their first meeting in 1992 the atmosphere between them was decidedly chilly. Both Alexander and Philip had assumed that they enjoyed a unique status as Isabella’s new protégé – she repeatedly told both of them that they were fabulous – but now they learnt that they would have to compete for her attention.
In July 1992, Lee was invited to Hilles, the Blows’ country house in Gloucestershire. British Vogue had commissioned Oberto Gili to shoot a story about the couple and their Arts and Crafts house and Isabella had asked McQueen to design all the clothes. When Lee arrived at Hilles, designed in 1913 by Detmar Blow’s architect grandfather, also called Detmar, he was enchanted by the view. In 1940, Country Life magazine described it in the following terms: ‘Its position, one to dream of but such as few would dare to tackle, is an unsuspected ledge just below the crest of the Cotswolds west of Painswick, commanding the whole valley of the Severn from the Malverns to Chepstow, with the better part of the Welsh Marches stretching range upon range westwards.’19 On the first night of his stay McQueen was placed in the best guest room in the house, complete with four-poster bed. Wherever Lee turned he saw something to marvel at: the long drawing room with its floor of raw elm; the panelling in the bedrooms remade by using coffin boards after a fire destroyed the house in 1951; the Queen Anne needlework carpet hanging as a tapestry in the ‘Big Hall’, a room that before the fire had comprised a hall and dining room; the coat of arms of James I featuring a lion and a unicorn and the words ‘Beati Pacifici’ (‘Blessed are the peacemakers’); and the portrait of Hilles’ architect Detmar Blow sketched by Augustus John. ‘There is little in the way of soft furniture,’ wrote one observer, ‘and the whole place has a rather dark, medieval, and slightly cold air. It is a lifesize theatrical set.’20
Although the house looked like something handed down through generations it was essentially modern, a monument to the benefits of hard work and upward mobility. ‘I remember Issie telling Alexander about my grandfather, that he was creative, but that the family was not posh, that we were from Croydon,’ said Detmar. ‘He knew that the house belonged to my mother and that we had no money. I had a very modest barrister’s income and Issie had hers [from magazines] which wasn’t much.’ The underlying ethos of the house was, in Detmar’s words, ‘utopian, egalitarian’, a spirit that made Lee, and many other guests, feel at home.21 During the course of the next two decades the ‘magnetism’ of Isabella and Detmar ‘attracted some of the most dazzling figures from fashion and the arts’ to Hilles.22 Detmar Blow remembers the thrill of meeting McQueen for the first time. ‘He was so excited, full of happiness and joy,’ he said. ‘He was lots of fun, smart and ambitious. We’d embarked on this adventure, like travelling on this chariot, Boudica-like.’23
Isabella was ecstatic about the clothes that McQueen had made for the Vogue shoot: a black wool hunting jacket; a delicate white dress fashioned from layers of sheer organza with red flower petals stitched between the fabric that, from a distance, looked like blotches of blood, and the beautiful pink silk frock coat with the barbed thorn pattern that Blow had bought from his graduate collection. Detmar wore a light pink Regency waistcoat decorated with ‘flower petals in a see-through material’ and one of his collarless barrister’s shirts with a white ruff, ‘with yet more rose petals in the see-through gauze material’. For one shot, Isabella and Detmar were pictured standing in an archway; above their heads was a bunch of flowers being held by ‘an upside-down Alexander’.24
Issie now regarded Lee as ‘Alexander the Great’: she lauded him with compliments and repeatedly told him that he was a genius. ‘Issie had known Basquiat and Warhol and both of them had rated her,’ said Detmar. ‘So for him to have that endorsement when he was twenty-three was extraordinary.’25 McQueen’s clothes were featured across six pages in the November 1992 edition of Vogue in an article entitled ‘Over the Hilles and Far Away’; as one commentator said, the equivalent price in advertising ‘would have run into the tens of thousands of pounds, but in that issue, young Alexander McQueen got the publicity for free’.26
The bond between Lee and Isabella, whom he liked to describe as a cross between a Billingsgate fishwife and Lucrezia Borgia, was intense. They would talk on the telephone at least four times a day and when they were together their laughter – a dirty, filthy cackling – never seemed to end. Isabella would invite him over to dinner with the likes of Hussein Chalayan, Rifat Özbek, Philip Treacy and Manolo Blahnik. She would frequently travel over to Stratford to take tea with Joyce McQueen, with whom she also formed a close friendship. ‘She has a wicked sense of humour, and she’s got those McQueen blue eyes,’ said Isabella about Joyce. ‘Very comely, and the minute you enter she’s always got a joke. I think Alexander is very like his mother.’ In the same interview, conducted in 2005, Isabella went on to describe her friend’s personality. ‘He was exactly the same back in those days as he is today: really funny, very witty, as raw as he is soft – he’s still got that great mixture of fragility and strength.’27
Around this time Isabella wanted to buy some of Réva Mivasagar’s petticoats, but when McQueen discovered this he became moody, jealous and possessive. Over the course of the summer of 1992 the relationship between the two young men living in Alderney Street began to toxify. Réva discovered that not only did Lee regularly read through his Filofax, but his friend started to wear and then steal his underwear, something that understandably ‘freaked’ him out.28 ‘He used to get really angry about things and we’d have really volatile fights,’ said Réva. ‘He wouldn’t clean the kitchen and one day I said something about him not doing his part, about how his mum obviously babied him and he said, “Don’t you fucking talk about my mother!” and I said, “Well, you don’t seem to want to clean up,” and he got hold of a pair of dressmaker’s scissors and started to stab me with them. I went upstairs really fast and he followed me and I had to lock my bedroom. He would try and stab me with the scissors all the time. That’s when I knew I had to get out of the house.’29
In a bid to try and make sense of the situation, Réva wrote to a friend in Paris and told him about the poisonous atmosphere in the house. His friend in France wrote back offering some advice, and after Réva had read the letter he was careful to rip it into pieces and drop it into the waste paper basket in his room. One day, when Réva was out, Lee walked into the bedroom, took the pieces out of the bin and pieced the fragments back together. McQueen read that ‘he was very hard to live with’ and that Réva ‘wanted to get out’.30 Silence descended on the house like a noxious gas and when the boys passed each other in the hallway or on the staircase they would not meet the other’s gaze. ‘Finally he called Isabella to tell her to get rid of me,’ said Réva.31
A few months later, when Réva went back to St Martins, he spotted Lee with a friend and said ‘Hi’. ‘But Lee just snubbed me and walked away,’ he said. ‘And we never talked to each other again. I think Lee was very aware of the future he wanted for himself, very aware of his path, and knew exactly where he was going.’32
From Pimlico McQueen moved south to Tooting and into a two-storey house at 169 Lessingham Avenue already rented by Simon Ungless. Simon lived upstairs while Lee occupied the ground floor. Here he had a bedroom at the front and at the back of the house a studio, which contained his sewing machine and where he could often be seen working amidst swathes of fabric. Isabella would sometimes telephone the house and if Simon answered would say just one word, ‘Alexander.’ Simon would say, ‘No, it’s Simon here,’ but Isabella would just repeat herself, breaking up McQueen’s middle name into four syllables. ‘I said, “God, you’re so fucking rude,” and Lee would be there laughing his head off,’ said Simon.33
That summer, Simon and Lee, who were always just good friends, had spent a great de
al of time together, taking poppers at Tooting Bec Lido and pretending to do synchronized swimming underwater. The boys also shared a passion for nature and Lee loved it when Simon would return from his parents’ home on the Wiltshire/Berkshire border with a brace of pheasants or French partridge, which they would pluck, eat and then reuse the feathers in clothes, while crows’ or pheasants’ feet would be metamorphosed into earrings. Simon introduced Lee to his friend Shaun Leane, who had started his career as a fifteen-year-old apprentice in Hatton Garden, learning the craft of traditional English jewellery. Their first meeting had been at the Three Greyhounds pub on Greek Street, a hang-out in those days for the St Martins crowd. Shaun noticed that Lee was quite shy and made an effort to try and place him at ease. It wasn’t long, however, before Lee felt he could relax in Shaun’s company. The three friends would go out and have fun at the Vauxhall Tavern, a gay pub in South London, where Lee used to enjoy a bottle or two of woodpecker Cider, or to the White Swan in the Mile End Road, or clubs such as Heaven or the Fridge in Brixton. Shaun remembers how, in Tooting, Lee would work in the back garden until it resembled a disaster zone, the ground covered in silicone and Plaster of Paris, the plants stained by red dye.
It was in the house in Tooting that Lee first read Simon Ungless’s copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. ‘He was amazed at how the book progressed and became more extreme,’ said Simon.34 McQueen was intrigued by the unremitting account of sexual abuse and torture that de Sade had written over the course of thirty-seven days while imprisoned in the Bastille in 1785. As Lee read the work, described by its author as ‘the most impure tale that has ever been told since the world began’35 he was gripped by the descriptions of the ‘simple passions’ (non-penetrative acts such as masturbation in the faces of seven-year-old girls, the drinking of urine, the eating of faeces); the ‘complex passions’ (the rape of children, incest, flagellation); the ‘criminal passions’ (mutilation, sodomy of three-year-old girls); and ‘murderous passions’ (skinning children alive, the disembowelment of pregnant women, masturbation while watching teenagers being tortured). ‘I gather some influence from the Marquis de Sade because I actually think of him as a great philosopher and a man of his time, when people found him just a pervert,’ McQueen told David Bowie. ‘I find him sort of influential in the way he provokes people’s thoughts. It kind of scares me. That’s the way I think . . .’36
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