Hume, however, noticed that McQueen, for all his ‘perverse view of women’, was trying to express a new spirit of modernity through his designs. The show spoke of ‘battered women, of violent lives, of grinding daily existences offset by wild, drug-enhanced nocturnal dives into clubs where the dress code is semi-naked. As such, his clothes probably speak with more accuracy about real life than some swoosh of an evening gown by Valentino.’ She recognized that, like Rei Kawakubo and Vivienne Westwood, McQueen had something new to say. When Kawakubo first showed her Comme des Garçons collection in Europe, about half of the audience walked out. Similarly, when Westwood adorned flesh-coloured leggings with drawings of penises Hume herself admitted to feeling appalled and disgusted. It was, she added, important to let young fashion designers experiment. ‘The shock of the new has to be just that: shocking,’ she concluded. ‘And if that sometimes leaves us fashion hacks tut-tutting like latter-day Miss Jean Brodies, or feeling distinctly off-colour, so be it.’3
At this time, London Fashion Week was still seen as something of the poor relation to its glitzier cousins in Paris or Milan. As Edward Enninful outlined in his introduction to a feature in the October issue of i-D magazine on six new talents to watch – McQueen was on the list, together with Nicholas Knightley, John Rocha, Abe Hamilton, Flyte Ostell and Copperwheat Blundell – while British creativity had been admired all over the world the country’s designers let themselves down because of poor business practice and less than perfect workmanship. ‘We showcase the development of innovative graduate design talent like nowhere else in the world, only to see it lured away to the fashion houses and factories of Europe,’ he wrote. However, a generation of fashion designers was showing that they could combine wearability and commercial prospects with canny business sense, a trio of skills that would ‘herald a rebirth for the much-maligned British fashion industry’.4 Lee told Avril Mair, who wrote the small profile on him that accompanied Enninful’s feature, that while he was ‘totally unponcey’ he wanted the new collection to incorporate ‘couture’s traditional handcrafted techniques into a range of simple pieces’. At the heart of his work was a certain eroticism – ‘Sex is a big part of what I do,’ McQueen said. Mair described the designer as looking ‘more like a football hooligan than the creator of sensitive and immaculate tailoring beautifully manipulated to flatter the female form’.5
Lee had turned to Fleet Bigwood, a print tutor on the St Martins MA course, for help with his fabrics. Fleet recalls the time two days after McQueen’s graduate show when Lee had turned up at the college wearing a sheepskin waistcoat, a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans and, in a state of fury, told him that he wanted to do his own collection. ‘I’m fucked off with it all,’ he had said. ‘Nobody’s interested in me apart from this mad fucking rich woman [Isabella Blow].’ ‘I liked his anger,’ said Fleet. ‘He was motivated to tell everyone to fuck off, the industry, the journalists and the buyers. He felt frustrated, he felt nobody gave him any recognition or understood what he had to offer.’ Bigwood lived in Streatham at the time, only half a mile or so from Tooting, and he would often travel over to Lee’s house, where he watched McQueen ‘burn or scorch or do disturbing things’ to the fabric. ‘It was so raw,’ said Fleet. ‘He was designing and cutting and developing his own fabrics. He wasn’t disciplined in that because he was a cutter, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to engage with every single element of the process.’ When Fleet saw the show Nihilism he recalls feeling a little underwhelmed. ‘I was born in 1962 and so I had been through punk, but Lee had been too young. I was a bit jaded by it – I thought he was trying to be shocking, and felt we’ve already been through this. Looking back now his influence on style was as big as punk and has had as much longevity.’6
Watching Nihilism with excitement was Marin Hopper, fashion director of American Elle and the daughter of the actor Dennis Hopper. When Lee and Marin had met earlier that spring, he had told her about his time on Savile Row when he would write secret messages in the linings of suits. ‘I thought it was so punk of him,’ said Marin, who subsequently featured his work in the pages of her magazine. Later, McQueen would tell Isabella and Detmar Blow that he had slept with Marin at the Hôtel Costes in Paris. ‘I would be the first person to admit it if it was true,’ she said. ‘There was something very flirty about him, but we never did that. We talked about sexuality, and the crushes he had on guys, but he was absolutely 100 per cent homosexual. Maybe he thought that the idea that we had slept together would shock people – the shock of the new, or rather the shock of the old.’7
Bobby Hillson was also in the audience that day. As she watched the girls walk through the Bluebird’s faded art deco space – this was in the days before the garage was converted into a swish restaurant – McQueen’s former tutor felt a deep sense of satisfaction that her gamble had at last paid off. ‘It sent chills through me,’ she said of the show, comparing her reaction to the heightened physical and emotional response one feels while watching first-rate theatre.8
Nihilism saw the first catwalk appearance of McQueen’s ‘bumsters’, low-cut trousers that, according to one fashion writer, created ‘a cleavage closer to the building-site than the boudoir’.9 Fashion historian Judith Watt believed that the origins of the bumsters – which eventually resulted in a whole generation of men and women wearing low-rise jeans or trousers below the waist – could be traced back to something McQueen had seen in his copy of Juan de Alcega’s 1589 Tailor’s Pattern Book (the volume, originally in Spanish, was published in English in 1978). In the sixteenth century, men wore their breeches low, so that they sat on or below the hipline. ‘By blending this line with modern tailoring techniques to create a fresh area of erotic interest, he achieved something new,’ she said.10
The base of the spine was, for McQueen, an erotic cynosure. By inventing the bumster McQueen introduced both sexes to the delights of the ogee, Hogarth’s S-shape ‘Line of Beauty’. This would form the central image of Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel of the same name, a book which is full of yearning for the visual pleasures offered by the double curve of the lower back. ‘I wanted to elongate the body, not just show the bum,’ McQueen said in 1996. ‘To me, that part of the body – not so much the buttocks, but the bottom of the spine – that’s the most erotic part of anyone’s body, man or woman.’11
For Seta Niland, a new friend he had met who was working as a stylist for magazines like The Face, the bumsters were a natural evolution of Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’, the French couturier’s revolutionary tuxedo suit that introduced an element of masculinity into women’s fashion. ‘Lee called the bumsters the builders’ pants or builders’ trousers,’ said Seta, who helped McQueen organize and style Nihilism. ‘He would have seen builders with their arses hanging out and that might have looked nice to him. But to then translate that to a woman? It was scary and I had to talk the models into wearing them for the show. I didn’t get it until a girl put them on. It was gorgeous, but a huge risk.’
Lee had been drawn to Seta because of her own dark history: she told him that her sister had been murdered. In turn, she was attracted to his personality because of his ‘outsider’ status. ‘I saw myself as a bit of an outsider too, not the right colour, although I probably had the right accent by then,’ she said. The two met after Lee had left St Martins and they used to hole up together in Maison Bertaux, making a coffee or tea and a cake last for hours on end, a treat that Seta, who like Lee was then ‘piss poor’, would usually pay for.
‘He kept banging on about producing a collection and I asked him, “How are we going to afford this?” I had seen catwalk shows and I knew how much they cost,’ she said. ‘But he said, “Let’s just give it a go.” To begin with it was my role to coerce people into giving us stuff for free. I went to the Bluebird Garage and told them that we were staging a show off schedule, which was a lie. I got some guys I knew who did the lighting at Glastonbury to do the lighting for the show. We cobbled some chairs together from peop
le in the rest of the building and begged and borrowed people to help with the press and the invites. I used all my contacts to get the models for free and we got some good girls for nothing.’
Throughout the process of putting the show together it was in danger of falling apart because of a lack of resources: Lee was still on benefits and Seta, who was living in a council flat in Kennington, did not earn much from her work for style magazines. On the day of the show itself Lee and Seta realized they had no money to buy underwear for the models. Seeing a roll of cling film, Seta had an idea and she started to pull out swathes of it and wrap it around the models. ‘Necessity breeds genius and creativity,’ she said, laughing.12 There were consequences, however. ‘Nobody got paid at all and at the end of the show the models were just throwing the clothes into bags,’ said Chris Bird.13
Seta also had to organize the music for the show. One of the tracks she chose was Radiohead’s 1992 single ‘Creep’, which depicts the ‘self-lacerating rage of an unsuccessful crush’.14 Backstage, when the show was over, Lee turned to Seta and told her he hated her for that choice of song. ‘He was absolutely pissed off, but he didn’t understand why I had chosen it,’ said Seta. ‘I wanted people to say, “Yes he may look like a creep but look at what he can do.” The fashion industry did see him as odd, as a lout, until his designs started to speak for themselves and then they all had to bow down. It was an ironic ending to the show because he was not a creep. Looking back it might all have been a bit rough and ready, with not much polish, but that was the beauty of Lee. The tailoring was amazing, the textiles were so innovative. But there was a brutal elegance to it, a phrase that I think really sums Lee up.’15
Nihilism also saw the first outing of another important McQueen signifier: the designer’s distinctive logo formed by a lower-case ‘c’ encased within an upper-case ‘Q’. Alice Smith had the initial idea, while her boyfriend at the time, a graphic designer, sketched the logo. ‘Lee didn’t pay for it, of course,’ said Alice. ‘Nothing was paid for, which I forgive him for. Those early shows were unlike anything you had ever seen before. They had immense shock value but also everything was beautifully made and conceived. Cressida and I would be practically in tears because we were so excited for him. You were never quite sure whether he would pull it off, and so it was with unravelling amazement that he would produce show after show and each show was bigger and better. But we always felt it could all collapse at any minute.’16
Towards the end of 1993, McQueen’s housemate Simon Ungless told Lee that he was moving in with his boyfriend. This meant that McQueen had to find somewhere else to live, but he still did not have enough money to rent his own place. Lee’s sister Jacqui, who had gone to live in Budapest for work, offered Lee the use of her flat in Chadwell Heath, and his brothers, Tony and Michael, said that they would help him move. One Saturday morning, Michael drove a van across London to Tooting and turned up only to find his brother still in bed. ‘Nothing packed, nothing done,’ recalls Michael. ‘I said, “Fucking get out, we’ve come all the way down here, get up.” That was the way he was.’17
Lee was grateful to be able to use his sister’s vacant flat in Spring Close, Chadwell Heath, but life in suburban Essex seemed dull after the grit of south London. Seta Niland remembers getting the train to Essex with McQueen from Liverpool Street – they used to jump over the barriers in order to avoid paying the fare – and being amazed by the sparseness of the flat. It was like a blank canvas, she said, but perhaps he found that creatively stimulating. ‘From the beginning, he kept coming out with these references to art, and he taught me so much,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t the “normal” fashion type, he did not progress from O levels to A levels to degree, but not having that made him much more driven. I met him with Isabella Blow once and I don’t think he was offended by the class difference between them, I think he was intrigued.’18
Throughout 1993, Isabella had been trying to persuade Steven Meisel to photograph a story for British Vogue. Meisel, who had been working for Italian Vogue and its editor Franca Sozzani since 1988, was reluctant. ‘There’s absolutely a queer sensibility to my work,’ he said, ‘but there’s also a sense of humour . . . a sarcasm and a “fuck-you” attitude as well as a serious beauty.’19 His profile was so high – he had just worked with Madonna on her 1992 Sex book – that the New Yorker was said to be the world’s highest-paid fashion photographer. ‘He’s widely regarded as one of the superstars of fashion photography,’ said Anna Wintour at the time.20 After Meisel finally agreed to take the job – the black and white photographs appeared in the December 1993 issue of British Vogue under the title of ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’ – the bill came to a rumoured £80,000, the most expensive shoot in the history of the magazine.
The brief for the story, which came to be known as the ‘London Babes’ shoot, was to find the most beautiful, blue-blooded British girls imaginable, said Plum Sykes. Sykes was then working as Isabella’s assistant and ended up modelling for Meisel, along with Stella Tennant, Bella Freud, Lady Louise Campbell and Honor Fraser. Blow had invited McQueen into the offices of Vogue to discuss which of his designs could be featured in the shoot. ‘But some of the editors at the magazine did not rate him at all,’ said Plum. ‘At that time people were still very interested in Paris and Christian Lacroix and Chanel and so London was dismissed. Some editors at Vogue thought that Alexander, as I called him, was some scruffy common boy. I remember he came into the office with a ripped-up lace punky dress – I think it ended up on Stella Tennant – and he did cut quite an odd figure. The office was very upper-middle class and he seemed so rough. He was wearing an old lumberjack shirt, jeans falling down with his bottom crack showing and a keychain. He was always a bit smelly and sweaty and grubby. I remember just being quite frightened of him. I was quite a prim Oxford girl and I didn’t understand his clothes. At the time, Issie said, “This boy is so talented, he is a superstar, look at his tailoring.” But I had only worked at Vogue for a year and didn’t understand great tailoring. Now I totally understand that he created this silhouette that was completely different from everyone else.’
At the end of 1993, Plum Sykes asked McQueen to make her a punk-inspired dress in black lace and chiffon for Vogue’s Christmas party. She gave him £20 to buy the fabric and an extra £50 for his time. ‘He made the dress, brought it to Vogue and came into the ladies loo and just chopped it and slashed it on the bottom and said, “There, it’s finished”. He was very hand to mouth, still officially unemployed and didn’t have a bank account. I quickly realized that he was very quick, clever and sharp – Artful Dodger-sharp. I remember thinking, “This guy is so much cleverer than me and my [Oxford] friends.”’21
Lee and Isabella – who had herself agreed to model – persuaded Plum to walk down the catwalk of his next show Bheansidhe (Banshee), held at the Café de Paris in London on 26 February 1994. Two days before, McQueen gave an interview to Kathryn Samuel, the fashion editor of the Daily Telegraph, in which he came out publicly as gay for the first time, something that made his mother furious. ‘Why do you have to publicize your private life?’ she asked him. ‘But it’s not my private life,’ he responded, ‘it’s just the way I am.’22 He also told Samuel that while the intention of his last show was to ‘give London a kick and shout’ he wanted his new collection to be more saleable. ‘My aim is to marry Savile Row with ready-to-wear,’ he said.23 The invitation for the show consisted of a black and white photograph taken by Rankin of an old, naked woman holding her arms behind her head, while the inspiration for the collection ‘came from Irish folklore about banshees heard wailing when a boat sank’, said McQueen. ‘It’s about women being at the helm, being strong.’24
When Rebecca Lowthorpe, now assistant editor of UK Elle, turned up backstage that day to model she had no idea what McQueen wanted her to wear on the catwalk: a body mould made from chicken wire and plaster of Paris. She remembers that it was so uncomfortable that she could not bend at the waist; when she wanted to rest she
had to lie on the floor and other models fed her Coca-Cola through a straw. The atmosphere backstage was ‘electric’, she said, and the show itself was memorable for its spirit of irreverence. It was, ‘an almighty fuck-you to the industry at large,’ said Rebecca, who had modelled for McQueen and the other students at St Martins. ‘He had the temerity to put these things called bumsters on the catwalk and have models striding down with their arses hanging out. It felt like a mini revolution. It was a punk moment in the purest sense.’25 Film-maker John Maybury, who had been born in 1958, had lived through punk and he recognized that Lee embodied the spirit of the anarchic movement. ‘Lee was a natural punk, it was inherent in his attitude,’ he said. ‘Punk wasn’t about that later wave of gobbing and spitting plebs, it was really driven by a bunch of art students and old Bowie fans. The aggression was more about visual violence, contesting the status quo, and that’s what Lee was all about.’26
Isabella Blow had ensured that Michael Roberts, Joseph Ettedgui, Manolo Blahnik and Suzy Menkes all attended the show, but McQueen was far from intimidated. If anything he was deliberately provocative. In an interview with Mark C. O’Flaherty in The Pink Paper he called the eminent fashion journalist and historian Colin McDowell, author of a recent book The Designer Scam, ‘a right fucking queen’ and went on to attack the power of the fashion pack. ‘I always try to slam ideas in people’s faces,’ Lee said. ‘If I get someone like Suzy Menkes in the front row, wearing her fucking Christian Lacroix, I make sure that lady gets pissed on by one of the girls, you know what I mean? These people can make you or break you, and they love you for just a moment. I may be the name on everyone’s lips at the moment, but they can kill you.’27 Adrian Clark, then a journalist at Fashion Weekly, awarded the collection 9/10 for creativity and only 7/10 for commerciality. ‘One of the hottest collections in town, helping London back to its feet as the creative capital of Europe,’ he said.28 Ettedgui, a respected designer and owner of several shops in London, believed that McQueen represented ‘a new energy in British design’ and labelled him the next John Galliano or Vivienne Westwood, while Blahnik raved about the designer’s finishing. ‘It’s modern couture: you just don’t find work like this in ready-to-wear,’ he said. ‘If he has any problem, it’s too many ideas.’29
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