Isabella had already imagined the kind of work she could do at Givenchy – she would serve as McQueen’s muse and she also wanted to launch a salon, ‘as they did in the eighteenth century,’ she said, or a ‘kind of Warhol, Factory thing’.42 It was, in Detmar’s words, ‘utterly devastating’ for Isabella when she discovered that McQueen decided not to include her in his plans. It was, in Detmar’s eyes, nothing short of a betrayal. ‘People said Issie shouldn’t get so worked up about it,’ said Detmar. ‘Fuck off, well she was and nothing was going to convince her otherwise. But the problem was Issie couldn’t fall out with him because she was addicted to McQueen. She didn’t want to lose the clothes.’43 During one interview, when Isabella had enjoyed a few mugs of Bollinger champagne, she stated that in future she wanted to get paid for her role as muse. ‘If Alexander uses some of my ideas in his show, and he has, I don’t get paid; he does,’ she said.44 ‘There was a moment of bad blood on her part,’ said film-maker John Maybury, friends with both Lee and Isabella. Fundamentally, McQueen was ‘quite a pragmatic person and when someone is fragile and unreliable it’s kinder not to drag them into a situation that could overwhelm them’.45
Daphne Guinness – the socialite who was friends with both Lee and Isabella – believed that although Isabella had been terribly hurt by the failure of Givenchy to give her some kind of role, she saw the fault lying more with the couture house than with McQueen. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she said. ‘She was more upset with the system. There was a place for her as a kind of Amanda Harlech to John Galliano, but they never had the imagination to employ her. I know from him that he was trying to steady his position. I think he was also trying to make Isabella be more responsible.’46 McQueen also needed people around him who did not jar his nerves, assistants who were stable, reliable and not prone to flights of fancy.
The news of McQueen’s appointment as design director of Givenchy was greeted with astonishment by the British press. Not only was he so young and relatively inexperienced – at twenty-seven he had only produced eight collections – but, in contrast to the refined and genteel house of Givenchy, he was a ‘self-proclaimed East End yob’. The Guardian’s profile of him, headlined ‘Bull in a Fashion Shop’, outlined how he was ‘more East End bruiser than haute couturier’. Journalist Susannah Frankel interviewed his former tutor Louise Wilson who called him a ‘creative genius’ and highlighted his extraordinary tailoring skills. Yet there were other people within the fashion industry who voiced ‘doubts, worrying that McQueen and Galliano’ were mere ‘pawns in a sophisticated publicity stunt’.47
After a few days in Paris, McQueen took the train back to London. On 21 October, he went to the opening of a new Valentino shop in Sloane Street; a photograph taken by Dafydd Jones showed an ecstatically happy Lee standing next to Murray Arthur. After the opening the couple went back to Supernova Heights, Liam Gallagher’s house in Steeles Road, Belsize Park. ‘That was quite a night,’ said Murray.48 The following evening they attended the British Fashion Awards at the Royal Albert Hall, where McQueen won his first British Designer of the Year award. ‘I never thought it was important to have recognition from your colleagues, but when it finally happens it justifies everything,’ Lee said, after being presented with the award.49
Some designers reacted with astonishment at the news, as they believed McQueen to be vastly overrated. Sir Hardy Amies, who attended the awards ceremony – the ‘naffest thing I’ve ever seen’, he sneered – said that he was dismayed by the recent appointments. ‘They have John Galliano for Christian Dior, and this other yobbo for Givenchy,’ he said. ‘And they have fallen into this trap that Paris sets for them to get publicity to sell scents. I don’t know anybody who would wear that stuff – but then I don’t dance around in nightclubs any more.’50 One anonymous student or staff member at St Martins aired their opinion in a piece of graffiti on a newspaper cutting kept by the college’s library. ‘From what I remember of him – I find it hard to believe he’s got this far! He seemed to be really dippy,’ they scribbled next to an interview with McQueen in the Independent on Sunday. ‘I think it’s all a con!!’51
Lee could hardly begin to imagine how the Givenchy deal would change his life. ‘I thought, all this time I’ve been freaking out about not being able to feed myself, and it was just, like, instantaneous,’ he said of his new-found wealth.52 His father had once advised him that if he wanted to sell clothes he should get a job on a market stall; after the news of the Givenchy deal he reportedly turned around to his father and said, ‘Now, that’s the way to sell clothes.’53 With his first pay cheque from Givenchy Lee finally paid back the money his aunt Renee had lent him to attend St Martins six years earlier.
Back in London, McQueen started to gather his team together to take to Paris: Katy England, Trino Verkade, Simon Costin, Sam Gainsbury, Sarah Burton, Shaun Leane, lighting expert Simon Chaudoir, Sebastian Pons and design assistant, Catherine Brickhill. ‘I chose these people because they are special and individual, the very best in their own professions,’ he said. ‘It’s like a soufflé really: if none of the ingredients are right, you get sludge; but if they are right, the whole thing rises.’54 McQueen also found a position for his boyfriend, Murray. ‘Within a few days he had said, “Come and work with me,”’ said Murray. ‘And I basically went into work on Thursday and told them I was finishing on Saturday. Because I had studied business at college Lee was like, “You can do the accounts.” I also helped with the PR and did anything that needed to be done.’55 When McQueen and his employees arrived in Paris, one French journalist called them ‘street urchins’, which slightly upset them at the time. ‘But looking back on it we were,’ said Catherine Brickhill. ‘We were in bleached jeans, zip tops and there was a healthy disrespect for the house.’56
Since leaving home Lee had lived in a series of squats, studios and rented or borrowed flats, places he had been forced to leave because the owners wanted to refurbish or sell or move back in themselves; now he wanted somewhere he could feel secure. Just as he was beginning to look for a house in north London he was contacted by the Independent on Sunday who asked him if he would be interviewed for the regular ‘Ideal Homes’ column. The question-and-answer feature ran in the newspaper at the beginning of November 1996. His ideal house would be located somewhere secluded on a hillside in Spain, overlooking the sea. ‘I have an affinity with the sea, because my ruler is Neptune and I am a Piscean,’ he said. Local amenities would have to include at least one bar, preferably a gay one, with a disco, and a supermarket that sold Marmite, baked beans and beluga caviar. It would be modelled after Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp: ‘My house would also have a glass roof so I could look up and see the stars when I’m in bed – it’s kind of nice when you’re with someone you love,’ he said. It would have five bedrooms and would be constructed from steel three inches thick so ‘even if there was a nuclear war maybe it wouldn’t get blown away’. The house would be equipped with three bathrooms, one of which would be made of slate with a sunken bath. ‘It would have a Gothic, dungeon feel about it and would double as a sauna and a sex playroom,’ he said. ‘I’d have harnesses and collar restraints and a few rats scurrying around for added atmosphere. Sound-proofing would be a big feature.’ In the reception room he would construct a glass table and chairs suspended from the ceiling, ‘hovering above the floor so your feet wouldn’t touch the ground.’ Also he said he would love a sunken fish pond in the floor of the living room, constructed in a figure of eight and with a number of little footbridges over it. The kitchen would be made from stainless steel and granite; he loved to cook, he said, but hated doing the washing up and so he would either get a dishwasher fitted or hire ‘a family of gypsies’ to do it. Ideally, he would not have any neighbours and the garden would stretch to 200 square miles around the house, land that he would let grow wild. The motto above the door of his home would read, ‘Enter at your own risk.’57
His flatmate Mira, who was upset at the prospect of him moving out of
the loft in Hoxton Square, helped him search for houses. The friends looked at only two places before Lee settled on a three-storey Georgian end-of-terrace house at 9 Coleman Fields, Islington. ‘I said, “Lee, you’ve only seen two houses.” I didn’t much like the one he had chosen, I thought he could do much better. But he said, “No, I’m buying it.”’58 McQueen completed the purchase on 17 December 1996 for £260,000, and spent thousands on renovations. Although his dream of having a sunken fish pond in the living room did not materialize, he did pay for an aquarium to be fitted into the wall of the dining room.
The end of 1996 and the beginning of 1997 were a manic period for McQueen. He had signed the Givenchy contract in mid-October and he only had eleven weeks in which to prepare for his first couture show for the fashion house in January. McQueen and his team commuted between London and a four-bedroom flat near the Place des Vosges. ‘The apartment to begin with was a little bit bare and it had just been repainted and refurbished,’ said Catherine Brickhill. ‘I remember he wanted to take a big pot of red paint and splash it across the whole apartment.’59 The money from Givenchy also allowed Lee to channel funds into his own label, beginning with a move into new business premises, a studio in Rivington Street, just around the corner from Hoxton Square, described by one observer as ‘The Young Ones meets a bypass-protesters’ encampment . . . Instead of a curtain, a ragged bit of fabric is pinned over one window. A spray-painted dummy stands in the middle of a floor strewn with old newspapers. A board pinned with pictures of models, running the gamut from Yasmin Le Bon to some young women who manage to make Karen Elson look chocolate-box pretty, leans against the wall of a boxed-in office-within-an-office.’60 Sarah Burton, who rejected a placement with Calvin Klein to work full-time with McQueen, remembers that before Lee started at Givenchy they had one pattern-cutting table that used to belong to BodyMap and Flyte Ostell, ‘with chairs that didn’t reach properly,’ she said. ‘When Lee got the Givenchy job, we got chairs that reached the table. And he was really excited because it meant there was money coming in, and he could do things he’d never done before.’61
Lee had no intention of learning French, but he hoped that he would be able to communicate with les petits mains in the atelier using gestures and signs. ‘I remember being in a fitting with him and he was asking the guy to take in the shoulder, “un petit pois”, a “little pea,”’ said Simon Ungless.62 Lee showed him his initial designs for the couture show, but Simon thought they were so bad that he urged him to start again. ‘You can’t expect Alexander McQueen to take over and suddenly it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread,’ Lee said.63 McQueen’s way of working was a shock for many at Givenchy. ‘Our house has extraordinary know-how, but it’s strictly classical,’ said Richard Lagarde, a senior tailor at Givenchy. ‘We weren’t used to having things shaken up, we had to completely change the way we worked.’64
In December, Lee and Murray took a break from the preparation of the show to travel to New York for the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute’s Gala celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of the founding of the house of Dior. At the dinner that night, the two men chatted to Princess Diana, who wore a John Galliano for Dior navy silk sheath dress, ‘the one that looked like a nightie’, said Murray. Earlier in the day, while at Heathrow airport, Lee and Murray had decided to order some oysters. McQueen ate one and immediately declared them to be off, but Murray finished the plate, as well as a few glasses of champagne. Murray felt unwell throughout the dinner at the Met and back at the hotel, the newly opened Soho Grand, he had to confine himself to the bathroom. The following night, after Murray had received some treatment from the doctor, McQueen was invited out to dinner with David Bowie and his wife Iman; as his boyfriend was too ill to go out Lee took along his assistant Trino Verkade. ‘David phoned the hotel the next day and said he wanted me to come over and meet him, so I went to his apartment, where he was wrapping Christmas presents,’ said Murray. ‘He made me two cups of black coffee and showed me this piece of art, a ball that moved around the floor.’65 Bowie told Lee that he ‘was so impressed by McQueen’s designs that he insisted on whipping out his chequebook’ to buy some clothes.66 While in Manhattan, Murray and Lee met up with Shaun Leane and photographs taken at the time show the three men wrapped up in overcoats, standing by the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza, smiling for the camera.
Back in Paris, McQueen continued to work on the couture collection. He had taken inspiration from both Givenchy’s white and gold label and also the mythological story of Jason and the Argonauts, whose mission it was to capture the fleece of the golden ram. Two weeks before the show the French photographer Anne Deniau began to take a series of behind-the-scenes images documenting McQueen at work, a process that would continue over the course of the next thirteen years. She had been working at Givenchy, capturing the backstage of Galliano’s shows – she liked, she said, ‘the panache, the craziness and the unbridled romanticism of Galliano’ and she was afraid that she ‘would not understand Lee’. She was wrong, she said. Before she had met him she had been handed a folder containing a few photographs from La Poupée and a profile of him. After reading through it she closed the folder and ‘said the two other words that would come up again and again: “Strength and fragility. Both, extremes; it won’t be easy.”’67
On first meeting Lee, Anne realized that he was, like her, a shy person. ‘When two shy persons meet, they hardly speak,’ she said. ‘They are looking at their shoes.’68 Deniau remembers the occasion when late at night on 18 January 1997, the night before the show, the model Eva Herzigova turned up for her final fitting. Lee took one look at her and knew something was wrong. ‘He walked around her like an animal in a cage, he kneeled, stood up, took two steps back, forward, back again,’ she said. ‘He remained still for a moment, then said, “Scissors,” and started cutting. One sleeve came off, then the other.’69 After the fitting, the designer and photographer shared a cigarette and McQueen asked her what she thought of the collection. Anne told of her likes and dislikes, at which point Lee said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, that’s crap, I failed.’ Anne tried to reassure him – the work was not worthless, she said, and he should give himself some credit, but she did think some of it was unfinished. ‘It’s done now,’ said Lee. ‘It’s too late.’70 Lee returned to the apartment – described by Eric Lanuit, then the press officer at Givenchy, as ‘a typical flat of a young English rocker, beer cans everywhere, bowls of crisps, ashtrays full of cigarette butts and joints’71 – where he and his small team enjoyed more than a few drinks. ‘We were partying, we had the shoes [from the show] there and we were parading around the house,’ said Murray. ‘We were so hungover the next day.’72
On the day of his first Givenchy show, on 19 January 1997, the atmosphere backstage at the École des Beaux-Arts, where Hubert de Givenchy himself had once been a student, had reached fever pitch. Naomi Campbell had to be fitted with a pair of ram horns that had been sprayed gold, horns which had come from a ram at Hilles with particularly ‘curly headgear’,73 while another model had to be patient while a large bull’s ring, again sprayed gold, was attached to the insides of her nose. Model Jodie Kidd recalls, ‘We were all corseted to the nines and I swear to God I thought I was going to have a heart attack because I was so nervous. I can’t breathe and he [Lee] is hyperventilating.’ Catherine Brickhill remembers how cramped the space seemed, with models and stylists and hair and make-up people running around ‘like crazy’. She recalls McQueen ‘legging it over to Eva Herzigova and cutting the laces on her corset and him saying, “You fucking bitch” and dragging her to get to her exit on time. She was in tears by the time she was out there. Nobody, I don’t think, had treated her that way.’74
The show, which started an hour late, was presided over by Marcus Schenkenberg, then the world’s highest-paid male model, who had been cast as Icarus. Sprayed with gold dust by Mira, and wearing nothing but a giant pair of wings and a loincloth, Schenkenberg watched the proceedings from a stone balcony
in the eaves. In the front row sat American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, with colleague Hamish Bowles, the designer Azzedine Alaïa, the German photographer Peter Lindbergh, Isabella Blow, sporting a black hat shaped like a satellite dish, and Joyce McQueen, wearing a checked suit from Evans. The reaction to the show was divided. Isabella Blow applauded at every outfit – Jodie Kidd dressed in a white satin coat with an enormous train over a gold bodysuit; a model who looked like Maria Callas (a reference to her role in Pasolini’s Medea) wearing a white dress and a hairstyle one observer likened to a ‘black bubble’; and numerous models with bare and gilded nipples. But there were many in the audience who were less than enamoured of what they saw on the catwalk. ‘The ladies of couture . . . were taken aback, it seemed, by the sheer excess of youthful vitality and confusion parading before them in outrageous clothing,’ wrote Hilton Als in the New Yorker. ‘The distinctly now was clearly passing them by.’ One French fashion journalist was heard to whisper, ‘Oo-la-la. If he continues with that kind of styling, he’ll lose them,’ and another said, ‘Disaster. Point.’75
McQueen gained positive reviews from Hilary Alexander at the Daily Telegraph, Susannah Frankel at the Guardian, and Mimi Spencer at the Evening Standard, but there were others who were less than kind. ‘You can’t come to Paris and compete with the Valentinos and the Chanels . . . and expect to win at twenty-seven,’ said Liz Tilberis, the editor-in-chief of American Harper’s Bazaar. ‘It was OK and fine if you showed it in London, but it was too derivative and the tailoring wasn’t quite what it should have been.’76 Colin McDowell of the Sunday Times attacked the show for being both ‘boring’ and ‘terminally naff’ – in fact, he said, ‘the whole thing began to look increasingly like a casting for Carry On Up Mount Olympus. It only needed Kenneth Williams to complete the camp picture of golden breastplates, rams’ heads and endless white. It wasn’t McQueen’s best game by a long way.’ His advice to McQueen was simple, he said: ‘Get rid of your stylists and accessory makers – they are spoiling your game – and resist the temptation to hide behind your youth. Yves Saint Laurent was only twenty-one when he took over the house of Dior.’77 The French press was even more vicious. Le Nouvel Observateur magazine attacked him for his appearance, ‘his slightly soiled shirt open at the neck; the chic way he carries a can of beer; and that haircut “très football-club de Liverpool”. Compared with him, an audience of AC/DC heavy-metal fans would win prizes for couture.’78
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