Helping McQueen to finish the pieces ready for the show was Sarah Heard (now Sarah Burton), a student at St Martins who had been introduced to Lee through one of her tutors, Simon Ungless. Born in 1974 in Prestbury, outside Manchester, Sarah started drawing clothes when she was a girl. ‘I remember buying Vogue from a very early age,’ she said. ‘I would tear out the pages and put them on my bedroom wall. The early Calvin Klein pictures, Avedon pictures . . . My art teacher said, “You have to go to St Martins.”’ In her third year at the college, Ungless arranged for her to have a year’s internship with McQueen, an experience she described as ‘beyond inspiring’. ‘I realized almost immediately: pattern-cutting, that was what it was all about,’ she said. ‘It was like a baptism of fire. St Martins taught me a lot but a year at McQueen you discovered the whole process.’16 Lee would cut the patterns and Sarah would help make the clothes. She recalls how McQueen showed her how to cut an S-bend and how to put in a zip. ‘I remember him being able to have a piece of flannel on the floor and being able to draw a pair of trousers with a piece of chalk, cut it out, sit at a sewing machine and “Rrrrr”, sew up a perfect pair of trousers just by eye,’ she said. ‘It gave you goosebumps.’17
The autumn of 1996 was an intense, highly stimulating time for McQueen. On 12 September, Jam: Style + Music + Media, an interactive exhibition that aimed to recreate a snapshot of nineties urban culture, opened at the Barbican. A whole room was devoted to McQueen, beginning the process by which the designer’s work was appropriated and legitimized by the lofty world of museums. Lee was asked by the curators how he would describe his work. ‘Eclectic verging on the criminal,’ he said. And his attitude towards life? ‘Criminal verging on the eclectic.’
Liz Farrelly, one of the organizers of the exhibition, explained how fashion could be viewed as art. ‘Forget the accusations of elitism and irrelevance which are levelled at cutting-edge British fashion,’ she wrote in Design Week. ‘When it comes to the crunch, here are designers and image-makers whose personal vision inspires and produces commercial successes and where self-motivation equals creativity.’ Citing the work of McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, David Sims and Juergen Teller, she believed that the ‘frocks look just as believable hanging on a wall as they do on a model, and the photographs look doubly so, freed from the confines of magazine spreads. In fashion, novelty has been superseded by innovation and self-expression, and that’s what I call art.’18 When critics asked McQueen the question, ‘Is fashion art?’, he would dismiss it with a sneer; all he was doing was making clothes for people to wear, he said. But over the course of the next two decades various museums – the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm (Fashination, 2004–2005); the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Savage Beauty, 2011) and the V&A (Savage Beauty, 2015) – would display his designs in a way that presented them not so much as utilitarian items of clothing but as exquisitely crafted, deeply engaging pieces of art.
At the same time as the Barbican exhibition, McQueen had been asked to contribute a piece of work to the Florence Biennale’s city-wide exhibition, Il Tempo e la Moda (Time and Fashion/Looking at Fashion). Curated by Germano Celant, Ingrid Sischy and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, the exhibition analysed the relationship between art and fashion. A number of contemporary fashion designers were asked to work with artists to produce specially commissioned pieces for the Biennale: Karl Lagerfeld and Tony Cragg; Gianni Versace and Roy Lichtenstein; Azzedine Alaïa and Julian Schnabel; Helmut Lang and Jenny Holzer; Miuccia Prada and Damien Hirst; Jil Sander and Mario Merz and Rei Kawakubo and Oliver Herring. When the curators approached McQueen he made it clear that he wanted to work with the photographer Nick Knight, whose startling images he had seen in magazines like i-D and The Face.
The two men had first met at a Vogue Christmas party, a meeting that Nick described as ‘quite romantic in a way’. Both of them were shy and it was clear each of them respected, even worshipped, the other’s work; later that same Christmas, McQueen sent Knight a fax saying, ‘Happy Christmas, Alexander McQueen’. Lee made contact again in the summer of 1996 and they met up to talk about ideas. Nick wanted to produce a piece of work based on the sex ads at the back of porn magazines, an idea that intrigued McQueen. One of the recurring themes of McQueen’s work, he said, was the idea of hidden beauty. ‘He seems very preoccupied with the notion of what’s inside, the hidden beauty that comes out after destroying the surface beauty,’ said Knight, in an interview with Charlotte Cotton for the British Library’s Oral History of Photography project. ‘He comes from a working-class background, but he is producing for the elite. From the difficult comes the beautiful, like the lotus flower blossoming in stagnant water.’19 One of the images they settled on for the Biennale, which opened on 20 September, was a portrait of McQueen’s head exploding, an image inspired by the Cronenberg film Scanners and one that was reproduced in the November 1996 issue of The Face; next to the photograph the captions reads, ‘Alexander McQueen, Victim of the Fashion Industry, 1996.’20 When, in the same issue of The Face; writer Ashley Heath asked McQueen about his best wind-up, the designer replied, ‘Getting my head blown up by Nick Knight in these new pictures, that’s my best wind-up yet. I mean, that’s not what I’m like.’ Really? ‘Well, when I’ve done too much charlie [cocaine] I feel like getting my head blown up but, no, that’s not what I’m like. Not really.’21 McQueen and Knight would continue to work together over the course of the designer’s career. ‘It has been quite a strange relationship,’ Knight told Charlotte Cotton in the late nineties, ‘and I am not sure how it will end.’22
On 27 September 1996, at the Horticultural Halls, the fashion world experienced a catwalk show that looked like an artwork in itself. The audience watched as the first model walked down a flight of stairs and onto the mirrored black surface; the realization that the girl was walking through water drew a collective gasp of surprise and delight from the crowd. The models, including Kate Moss, Jodie Kidd and Stella Tennant, wore Perspex wedge-heeled shoes and ‘they appeared, quite literally, to walk on water’.23 The reference to water also held a more personal meaning for McQueen and his team. La Poupée was dedicated to David Mason, a close friend of Katy England’s, who had committed suicide by filling his backpack full of bricks and throwing himself into the Thames. The theme of the transiency of life was expressed at the end of the show when a model staggered down the watery catwalk with a transparent geometrical structure enclosing her head and half her body; inside fluttered dozens of moths. (The imagery would be explored further in McQueen’s show Voss in September 2000.)
The most controversial aspect of the show, however, was McQueen’s decision to send a black model, Debra Shaw, down the catwalk wearing the shackle-like piece of body jewellery made by Shaun Leane. The audience went wild, but later the designer was accused of using the imagery of slavery to sell clothes, something he vehemently denied. ‘When Debra Shaw, the black model, walked contorted in a frame that image had nothing to do with slavery,’ he said. ‘It was the idea of the body reconstructed like a doll-like puppet.’24 The use of a photograph of a skeletally thin African child on the back of a jacket also drew some criticism from Christian Aid. The head of campaigns, John Jackson, said, ‘It is basically simply crass. If this jacket is designed to shock then it’s worked on me. I think it is tasteless to turn famine into a fashion statement.’25
However, the majority of the reviews were ecstatic. His show was the highlight of London Fashion Week, wrote Iain R. Webb in The Times. ‘Exquisitely beaded Jazz Age fringed dresses looked remarkably sophisticated, as did clingy transparent dresses embroidered with cherry blossom and swirling Chinese dragons,’ he said. ‘Likewise his viciously tailored trouser suits in rose-pink brocade and icy-white matt sequins. However, McQueen could not resist a little anarchic fun, so he sliced them up with zip fasteners, or spray-canned them with slashes of brightly coloured paint.’26 Tamsin Blanchard of the Independent said that La Poupée was McQueen’s ‘most accomplished collection to date’. The whole London fa
shion scene seemed reinvigorated due to the creative genius of Hussein Chalayan, Antonio Berardi, Clements Ribeiro, ‘and above all, Alexander McQueen’, whose clothes were both wearable and desirable. ‘Every pair of fine brocade trousers, each dusty pink catsuit, and every stitch of his bias-cut evening dresses, was masterful,’ she said. ‘A fine, sheer mesh dress embroidered with dragons; a razor-sharp, shiny, sea-green trouser suit; a bias-cut dress with a train trailing out into the dark ripples of water. This was a collection to leave no one in doubt that the designer could take on a couture house and breathe fresh life into it.’ Sitting in the audience were representatives from LVMH, the French multinational luxury goods conglomerate that owned both Dior and Givenchy, figures who ‘could not have failed to be impressed’ by McQueen’s extraordinary vision.27
Throughout the summer of 1996 there had been rumours about possible changes at Givenchy. In July, Gianfranco Ferré announced his departure from Dior, a move that opened up a series of tantalizing possibilities. At first it was thought that Vivienne Westwood had secured the top job at Dior, something she was forced to deny, while other names mentioned in the press included Marc Jacobs, Martin Margiela, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix. When McQueen was asked whether he would take the position if it were offered to him he said, ‘There is only one Paris fashion job for me – Yves Saint Laurent.’28 Joyce McQueen called the prospect of her son taking over a Paris atelier ‘a fairy-tale’, while Lee himself said of couture, ‘It is where the dreams of your life in fashion become reality.’29 In an interview with Le Figaro, the head of LVMH, Bernard Arnault, outlined what he was looking for: ‘I want modern creativity in the spirit of Christian Dior himself,’ he said.30
At the end of the summer Bernard Arnault offered the position to John Galliano, which in turn left open a vacancy at the esteemed couture house established by Count Hubert Taffin de Givenchy in 1952. Famous for dressing Audrey Hepburn, Givenchy was known for the elegance and refined tailoring of his clothes. According to the entry in McDowell’s Directory of Twentieth Century Fashion, words that McQueen himself would have read, Givenchy ‘was a designer of lasting quality who, without gimmicks or vulgarity, would create clothes in the great tradition of couture’.31 Would McQueen go to Givenchy? When the designer was contacted by Constance White of the New York Times at the end of September with this very question his response was, ‘I can’t say nothing.’32 All he would tell her was that she would have to await an announcement on 14 October. McQueen had been contacted by representatives of LVMH in September, but as Sarah Burton remembers, ‘Lee thought he was being given a job to design a handbag for Vuitton.’33 The news that he was being offered the job of creative director of Givenchy unsettled him to such an extent that he had to go to the bathroom. ‘I heard that after they phoned him he put the phone down and had a shit and came back to the phone,’ said Andrew Groves.34 ‘The first thing he did was he called me from the toilet at home,’ said Murray. ‘He said, “I have been offered this job in Paris, if I take it will you come with me?” I said, “Yes, of course, why not?”’35
McQueen felt ambivalent about taking the job and, unusually for him, sought out the advice of others. Alice Smith tried to persuade him to turn it down, believing that he would not be able to cope with the elitism of Paris. Isabella Blow, meanwhile, hoping that Lee would secure her services as a consultant, pleaded with him to take it.
In the end, Lee agreed and LVMH sent him a draft contract. At the beginning of October, Detmar Blow rang his accountant John Banks, as he knew he spoke French, and asked him whether he could cast his eye over the paperwork. Lee and John spoke over the phone and made an arrangement for the accountant to travel from his home in Gloucestershire to the studio in Hoxton Square. When John arrived in Shoreditch in the early evening of 8 October he was told that Lee was in bed. McQueen finally emerged and told John that although he was supposed to travel to Paris to sign the contract the next day he had decided not to take the job. Just then, the telephone in the studio rang – it was one of the representatives of Givenchy on the telephone. Lee didn’t know what to do.
McQueen passed the telephone to John who told the executive from Givenchy that he would call him back in half an hour. The two men then sat down and talked. The problem with the job, said McQueen, was the money – it wasn’t enough. ‘I think they were offering something like £300,000 a year,’ said John. ‘Lee wanted more. I said, “What, £400,000?” No, he wanted more. “£500,000?” No, that was probably too much. So we settled on something like £450,000. He also said that they wanted him to sign a three-year contract, but he only wanted to do it for two years. So I got on the phone and said, “These are the things that Lee wants. He’s not coming to Paris tomorrow unless he gets them.” The man had to go off and speak to Mr Arnault and about half an hour later he called back and said it was a deal. But he also said that Mr Arnault wanted to know whether Lee was committed to this. I asked Lee and he said yes, he was. I put the phone down and said it was all sorted but that was when Lee told me that he wanted me to go with him the next day.’
John returned home to Gloucestershire to pick up his passport and early the next morning took a train to London. He bought a copy of The Times at Swindon station and opened it to see the headline, ‘French Fashion Has Designs on Britons’, and underneath a story about how McQueen had been offered the job at Givenchy. ‘I don’t know if they realized how close they got to getting this wrong, as they had obviously got this ready to print before I had had a conversation with Lee,’ said John.
On 9 October, Lee met John in the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo to get a morning train to Paris. Accompanying them on the trip, in standard class, was Isabella Blow, who had turned up with six or seven hat boxes and a couple of suitcases. As Lee and John tried to go through the contract, Isabella started to wander up and down the train looking for friends who happened to be travelling to Paris; it was Fashion Week and so she hoped there might be other designers or models she could talk to on the train. Twenty or so minutes later, Isabella returned with a young model and the two women proceeded to strip down to their underwear and swap clothes. The women thought this was a hoot; McQueen was far from amused. ‘She’s doing my fucking head in,’ Lee muttered to John.
The party from London was met by a car at the Gare du Nord, but as Isabella’s proliferation of hat boxes and suitcases would not fit in the boot, a taxi had to be ordered to carry the excess luggage. ‘We went to Givenchy, and had lunch with the managing director,’ said John. ‘I remember Lee being really quiet and Isabella did most of the talking. Then she went off, as she was staying in an apartment. Lee went to see Mr Arnault and I sat down with the lawyers. In the middle of this, Isabella called to say she had locked herself out of the flat, and Givenchy had to find a locksmith for her. We were running through the documents with Lee and the lawyers when Isabella burst into the room with a bizarre hat on, all wires and beads.’ Finally, in the early evening, McQueen signed the contract and John left the building to get his train, while Isabella and Lee enjoyed a celebratory dish of caviar, washed down with vodka and champagne.36 From now on, when McQueen returned to Paris, he would no longer have to take the metro or hail a taxi, as Givenchy had provided him with a Mercedes Sedan complete with a chauffeur.
McQueen stayed in Paris to enjoy the shows. That night, after signing the contract, Lee, dressed in a suit and a pair of trainers, went with Isabella to see Rifat Özbek at the Moulin Rouge and Ann Demeulemeester, whose simple jersey dresses were worn by a parade of androgynous models. On 10 October he took his place in the front row at the Christian Lacroix show, ‘the master of eccentric French dressing’, who reportedly had turned down the Givenchy job earlier in the summer. While in Paris, McQueen gave an interview to Hilary Alexander of the Daily Telegraph, who described him as ‘tousle-haired, unshaven, wearing a strange conglomeration of what I take to be pyjamas, but turns out to be a Comme des Garçons shirt and “Bosnian” combat pants.’ Lee told the newspaper’s fashion editor of
his admiration for the chairman of LVMH. ‘Arnault is a man of unusual vision,’ he said. ‘He has seen videos of all my shows and he understands what I am trying to do, better than most of the press. He is also committed to creativity 120 per cent. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.’ McQueen accepted that his workload would be heavy – he would have to produce four collections a year for Givenchy (two haute couture, and two ready-to-wear), plus two shows a year under his own label – but he said that he felt far from ‘overwhelmed’. He had reached a certain level of maturity to know what was appropriate for certain audiences and said, ‘Of course, I’m not going to have “bumsters” on the [avenue] George V [the location of the Givenchy atelier]. I may be quite mad on the public circuit, but I’ve got my head screwed on – tight with a wrench.’37
Before John Banks, who would continue to work as McQueen’s accountant for the next four years, had left Gloucestershire for Paris, Detmar Blow had told him to make sure that Isabella ‘got something’ from the deal.38 Indeed, on 1 November it was reported in The Times that Isabella had secured a job with her friend, in charge of preparing advertising campaigns for Givenchy.39 ‘Isabella did talk about a role for her at the time of the Givenchy deal, but this would not have been with Givenchy, but between Lee and herself,’ said John.40 When John Banks tentatively questioned McQueen about such a role, he supposedly replied, ‘Issie and I are not about money.’41
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