Lee’s friend Chris Bird, who met him in 1993 through the illustrator Richard Gray, often thought of the parallels between McQueen’s work and that of de Sade, particularly his novels Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded. ‘That whole aspect of chronicling man’s inhumanity to other men – not condoning it but showing it,’ he said. ‘This is someone – Lee – who embroidered “Life is Pain” on an item of clothing for one of his collections. There was an element of romanticism in his work, but also cruelty. There was an aspect of bondage, but he wanted to liberate women and enable them to be fierce on a catwalk.’37
Caroline Evans, professor of fashion history and theory at Central St Martins, has written on the links between de Sade and McQueen in her book Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness. ‘Both in the cruelty of McQueen’s cut and in the choice and styling of his catwalk shows, he recalled the great female libertines of the Marquis de Sade, with their repertoires of savage dominance and mastery,’ she wrote. ‘Sade’s dangerous females were superwomen so exceptional that they were almost beyond gender . . . McQueen, like Sade, was fascinated by a dialectical relationship between victim and aggressor, and the parade of women he created on the catwalk resembled Sade’s aggressors rather than their victims . . . In his visual imagination there operated an economy very like that of double-entry book-keeping: every instance of goodness was balanced by one of cruelty, every gesture of dominance also sketched a gesture of subservience. As his shows progressed the victimized model gave way to a more powerful image, as prey became predator.’38
De Sade also outlined how morality is an artificial construct, a matrix of rules and restrictions designed to contain and control the ‘natural’ urges of man. As McQueen read his way through The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom the young designer felt as though he was finally being given permission to express his sexuality – which some might have seen as excessive, messy, dirty or sordid – in a way that pleased him. In his eyes, nothing was out of bounds or too shocking. ‘Lee had a voracious sexual appetite, he loved getting fucked,’ said his friend Chris Bird.
One morning, after Chris Bird had stayed over at the house in Tooting, he came out of the shower and was drying himself in the bedroom when Lee burst into the room and tried to seduce him. ‘He wasn’t my type, it was like Run for Your Wife or something,’ said Chris, referring to the Ray Cooney farce. ‘Later I reminded him of the incident and he sort of freaked out, he didn’t want to talk about the past and rejection.’
One of Lee’s favourite greetings, at least for ‘lucky’ gay male friends such as Chris Bird, involved sticking a finger up his arse and as you walked into the pub he would suddenly thrust the smelly digit in front of his mate’s face and say, ‘Meet Lee!’, quickly followed by his cackling fishwife laugh. McQueen loved telling an anecdote about how one day he went into the V&A Museum and his bag was checked by security. ‘He had a dirty dildo in his sports bag and the guards found it, he thought that was hysterical,’ said Chris. ‘The reason why he and Isabella got on so well was because they loved talking about sex, about big cocks and getting fucked.’39
Lee often regaled his friends and work associates with tales of his sexual exploits. Alice Smith – who Lee met in the autumn of 1992 when she worked for the fashion recruitment agency Denza – likened him to a filthy-mouthed court jester who regaled her and her professional partner Cressida Pye with elaborate stories of cruising on Hampstead Heath. ‘He was always interested in sex and wanted to tell us what he had been up to in great detail,’ said Alice. ‘I remember once he told us that he went to Clapham Common to meet men. One day he was tied to a tree by a man who then ran away and left Lee there until the morning. He had the most brilliant laugh, a real old hag’s screeching. We used to say, “Can you keep it down, Lee,” because we would be on the phone to Mulberry or someone and there he would be sitting in the office telling filthy stories.’
Lee had registered with Denza soon after graduation and, dressed in a three-piece suit ‘looking like a little hamster’, went for an interview with Alberta Ferretti. ‘I thought he’s never going to get the job looking like that, like a bank clerk, and he didn’t,’ said Alice. When Smith and Pye left to form their own agency, based in St Martin’s Lane, he followed them in the hope that they would find him work. ‘He was excited that we had run away from this big agency and set up on our own,’ said Alice. ‘There was a sense of kinship between us because I think he felt like a bit of a freak, a bit of a loner. He liked the idea that Cressida and I were being these sort of pirates.’ The women recognized McQueen’s talent immediately: on his Smith & Pye form, which Lee had filled in giving details such as his address, they had written the words, ‘This is a star.’ His drawings, sketched with an ‘H’ pencil – pale, neat, controlled and precise, like something created by an architect – were beautiful and not in the least flamboyant.
Alice would invite Lee around to her flat in Primrose Hill to make trousers for her: she would buy the fabric from Berwick Street market and for £50 he would rustle up a pair of palazzos, trousers with a wide leg that flares out from the waist. ‘I would say what I wanted but he would answer back, “I’m not going to do it like that,”’ said Alice. ‘He would put the fabric on the floor of my tiny flat in Primrose Hill and would cut the trousers without drawing or making a pattern. I couldn’t believe it. I remember he always used to walk around with a pair of big tailor’s scissors, which I think his aunt might have bought for him. Money was very tight and we used to lend him cash from the company – when I say “lend” it never came back. Although we never had any money ourselves we genuinely thought that he was brilliant, we had a lot of faith in him and so we went along with it. We were carried away by the excitement of it all.’40
In order to bring in a little more cash – he was still living on unemployment benefit at this time – Lee started to make and sell waistcoats, some of which he brought into the offices of Vogue. Anna Harvey, then the magazine’s fashion director, remembers seeing these ‘rather marvellous waistcoats’ and although she thought of buying one for her son, who was a prefect, she did not do so, something that she now regrets. ‘Lee was quite unusual and agonizingly shy and felt rather out of place in the Vogue fashion room surrounded by shrieking girls,’ she said. ‘I remember him as pale-faced and startled-looking. But there was a quiet confidence to him and on the basis of seeing those half dozen waistcoats I thought this guy knows where he is going.’41
Throughout the latter part of 1992 and into the spring of 1993, McQueen was busy at work on his first collection, which he called Taxi Driver. Smith and Pye volunteered their services as public relations consultants. Alice rang her friend Katie Webb, who was then working on Sky magazine, and secured the first piece of press on McQueen. There was only one problem: although Lee knew he needed the publicity he did not want to be photographed in case the Department of Social Security spotted him and cut off his benefits. McQueen, together with photographer Richard Burbridge, came up with the idea of wrapping his face in gaffer tape. ‘I think there was also an element of Martin Margiela to it,’ said Chris Bird, referring to the Belgian designer who refused to have his photograph taken. ‘It made him more enigmatic.’42 The look, borrowed from bondage and fetish wear, obviously appealed to Lee: around the same time he gave Simon Costin a photograph of himself, his face bound by tape, with one of Costin’s bird skull necklaces draped over his bare chest. McQueen told Webb, ‘Some of us are born the wrong shape, too short or too fat, and I’m working with patterns that make people look better and improve their self-esteem at affordable prices. I want to use everyday people in my show – after all, we can’t all be Ivana Trump.’43
For Taxi Driver, McQueen turned to the cinema for inspiration, particularly the films he had recently seen at the Scala in King’s Cross. ‘I love Pasolini and Stanley Kubrick,’ he said. ‘This was my homage to film and photography.’44 Of course, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film starring Robert De Nir
o as disturbed taxi driver Travis Bickle and the young Jodie Foster as child prostitute Iris ‘Easy’ Steensma, played a central part in the collection: McQueen asked Simon Ungless to help him print a photograph of De Niro in the role which he then printed on a taffeta tailored jacket. It’s not hard to see why the film appealed to McQueen – he could identify with both the vigilante Bickle and the exploited and abused Iris who he tries to save.
McQueen worked hard on the collection and he told Lucinda Alford at the Observer that he was keen to experiment and try out new techniques. He dipped the edges of fabric in latex instead of hemming them and incorporated feathers encased in a ‘sandwich of clear vinyl’. The attention to detail was astounding, ‘with sleeves often made of three pieces then constructed with twice that number of seams,’ wrote Alford. ‘Collars and sleeves are constructed using principles of origami; a seam at the elbow and lining fabric under the arm means that jacket sleeves can fit tight to the body and still allow for movement.’45
At this time in the early nineties, Britain’s fashion industry was in the doldrums – the country was still recovering from a recession characterized by falling house prices, high interest rates and an overvalued exchange rate. In 1993, four former British designers of the year – John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, Katharine Hamnett and Workers for Freedom – together with the then current holder of the title, Rifat Özbek, had decided to show their collections abroad, either in Milan or Paris. Betty Jackson opted to present her work via a video while John Richmond also chose to show in Paris. ‘London Fashion Week does not attract enough international press and buyers,’ said Richmond. ‘If my business is to expand, I must show in Paris.’ In 1990, twenty-one designers staged shows in London and 250 names took stands at the adjoining trade exhibition. In March 1993, only ‘thirteen designers are staging shows, with another sixty at an exhibition at the Ritz hotel,’ reported Roger Tredre in the Independent on Sunday. ‘There is no shortage of talent in Britain,’ said Tredre, who picked out McQueen as one of the rising stars, along with Bella Freud, Amanda Wakeley, Flyte Ostell, Sonnentag & Mulligan and Abe Hamilton. ‘Money, rather, is the core of the problem.’46
In order to address this, the British Fashion Council set aside a small sum of money to sponsor six new talents: Alexander McQueen, Sonnentag & Mulligan, Lisa Johnson, Paul Frith, Abe Hamilton and Copperwheat Blundell. Lee Copperwheat had met Lee McQueen at St Martins when he had worked as a visiting lecturer on the MA course; the two men had become friends and enjoyed clubbing together. ‘He was quite wild, we liked the same things, he was up for anything, a bit naughty,’ said Lee. ‘We started hanging out and became really close. But I didn’t see his genius until the Ritz hotel show.’47
The group show, held in a series of rooms in the hotel, was small in scale; the work was not exhibited on models but on rails and McQueen’s clothes were displayed on coat hangers from Dorothy Perkins. ‘It all seemed so hopeless till I was drawn down the corridor by the sound of squawking laughter,’ recalls the fashion critic Sarah Mower. ‘It was Isabella Blow, with a Philip Treacy feathered explosion on her head, corralling people towards a rack of razor-sharp tailoring, behind which was a bullet-craniumed cockney boy.’48 Nilgin Yusuf, writing in the Sunday Times, also picked out McQueen’s work. She was in raptures over a ‘quilted, bejewelled’ collar, a ‘confection fit for an empress’,49 while Lucinda Alford in the Observer wrote of McQueen’s ‘indisputable skill as a pattern cutter. A mixture of made-to-order couture and ready-to-wear, it contains some of the most interesting cuts around. His style has evolved out of a mix of freer bias cuts, using and updating historical references as well as futuristic shapes and printing processes.’50 Lee’s sister, Janet, went along to the hotel with her mother, Joyce, and aunt, Renee; her perspective was rather different to that of the fashion editors. ‘I remember looking at these garments and thought to myself that I wouldn’t wear them,’ said Janet. ‘I was quite classic, not experimental like Lee. But Isabella Blow was going mad for the clothes.’51
Perhaps all the positive press attention went to Lee’s head a little – after all, his name had even made it into the pages of The Times. ‘Their designs are unequivocably of today,’ wrote Iain R. Webb of the Ritz six, ‘their names should be world-famous tomorrow.’52 After packing up the collection into black bin bags, Lee and Simon Ungless went for a few drinks in Comptons in Soho and then on to Man Stink, at Central Station, another gay pub in King’s Cross. Short of cash, as always, the two young men decided not to deposit the bags in the cloakroom, but hid them away under some rubbish bins outside. ‘We danced and drank for a few hours and completely forgot about the clothes when we left to go back to Tooting,’ said Simon. ‘Lee went back the next morning but of course the bags and clothes were gone.’53
The reverence and awe with which fashion collectors and curators regard McQueen’s clothes today – a single vintage piece can be worth tens of thousands of pounds – did not apply in the more carefree and chaotic early nineties. Alice Smith remembers one occasion in early March 1993, on the way back from a shoot for the Daily Telegraph on designers and their muses, in which she had been photographed wearing a McQueen leather bustier and an extravagant ruff made from pheasant tails. As she held it in her hands the feathers kept dropping out over the seat and onto the floor of the cab. ‘Do you want this?’ she asked. Lee shook his head and so the design was abandoned in the taxi. ‘The Met tracked me down and asked me if I had it for Savage Beauty and I had to say no,’ said Alice. ‘There are so many things that are missing. Lee used to leave rails of clothes in our office and we said to him, “Can you get these out of here?” as we really did not have enough space.’ Again, the clothes were confined to the trash.54
On 17 March 1993, Lee celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday at Maison Bertaux with a small group of friends, including Tania Wade, whose birthday fell on the day before his. ‘I remember once he sent over a top with McQueen written on it, but for some reason it disappeared within the building,’ said Tania. ‘Lee wanted to know what had happened to it, and I told him the chefs probably thought it was a bloody J-cloth. “You fucking cheeky cow,” he replied.’55 Lee also became friendly with Tania’s sister, Michelle Wade. One day he told Michelle that he would like to stage a fashion show outside the shop. He had a vision of erecting a platform and scattering hay all down Greek Street, a project that never materialized. ‘That’s when I thought to myself, “Who is this?”’ This is someone with real imagination,’ said Michelle. ‘At first he was a little shy, withdrawn and awkward – he was someone who was obviously a conflicted person – but as time went on it became easier for him to deal with people. But he wasn’t a fluid person. I think it was because he had so many ideas going around in his head.’ Lee made Michelle a long black military coat with a tartan lining, ‘and now even after about fifteen years I put that coat on and I feel good. That’s what he did for a woman, he made you feel fantastic.’56
Chapter Five
‘Sex is a big part of what I do’
Lee McQueen
The lights went down, Cypress Hill’s eulogy to drug taking, ‘I Wanna Get High’, blasted out of the sound system and a thin girl wearing a pair of shockingly low-cut silver trousers and a beautifully tailored frock coat staggered out in front of the audience. It was 20 October 1993 and the venue was the Bluebird Garage on the King’s Road, London. As the show, Nihilism, progressed, the ‘heroin chic’ imagery became darker and more disturbing. One of the models gave a middle-fingered salute to the audience. Another girl wearing a long, sleeveless white cotton dress splattered with red dye looked as if she had been attacked. A few moments later a pale-faced young woman emerged in a mini-dress made from cling film that appeared as if it had been smeared with mud and blood. The effect was Carrie trapped in a couture house.
‘Alexander McQueen’s debut was a horror show,’ wrote Marion Hume in the Independent, which devoted a whole page to Nihilism under the headline ‘McQueen’s Theatre of Cruelty’. ‘In between
bursts of hard house music, there was an eerie silence where usually motordrives whirr and shutters click. The photographers, many of them veterans of as many war-zones as fashion shows, had nearly all stopped snapping.’ Hume admitted that the imagery made her and many of her colleagues distinctly queasy. She was used to naked flesh, of which there was some, but this was something else. ‘But models who look as if they have recently experienced serious traffic accidents, in sheer and sweaty cling film knickers, with what appeared to be bloody, suppurating, post-operative breasts visible through muslin T-shirts, was rather a lot to take in the name of frocks.’1
Understandably, none of the fashion journalists had a clue about the true origins of the imagery which stemmed from Lee witnessing the endless beatings suffered by his sister Janet at the hands of her husband, the same man who abused McQueen when he was a young boy. As a result, some critics wrote the show off as distasteful and misogynistic. One reviewer, for the trade journal Draper’s Record, even found the collection boring: ‘Apart from the occasional 1970s suit in a two-tone diamond print and high-collared shirts in masculine check, the rest was not worth the hour wait.’2
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