McQueen knew that he could have done better. Instead of a night out partying Lee had a cup of tea with his mum and then went back to the flat with Murray. ‘I had one month to make everything and embroider it,’ he said later. ‘We got slammed by quite a few people in Paris, which, in a way, I was more upset about because I didn’t have control. If it were my own label, I wouldn’t care. But it’s like I’m working for someone and I can’t take an aggressive stand and say, “Well, I don’t give a toss what you think, this is why we did it, this is what we think, it was a McQueen collection.” All of a sudden we had these wallies saying, “This is not couture, this is a lot of bollocks.” But being about couture is trying to find new clients for couture, and it’s hard to do that when you have the press saying this is not for Anne Bass,’ referring to the Manhattan socialite and philanthropist who regularly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on pieces of couture. ‘I mean, I don’t want to bloody dress Anne Bass anyway.’ His new ideal customers were women like Courtney Love and Madonna, he said.79
The morning after the show McQueen endured a string of interviews, some of which he found embarrassing. One French journalist asked him what he thought fashion would be like in the year 2000 – ‘I mean, what a load of crap. I mean, I make clothes. I’m not a fortune teller,’ he said – while another wondered whether, as a designer famous for using corsets, he had ever thought of restraining the male genitalia. Lee burst out laughing at the idea. He had four appointments that day, one with a Saudi Arabian princess who wanted him to design her wedding dress. ‘I’m really nervous because I can only be myself, and couture’s not for the average person on the street. It’s about paying £20,000 for a dress.’ He realized that restraint was one of the secrets of success. ‘Structure and finesse are what couture is all about,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to embroider everything in sight or play around with loads and loads of tulle. That has no relevance to today’s market. You’ve got to take couture into the twenty-first century.’80
The experience of his disappointing first show for Givenchy had left him hurt and more than a little damaged, but he tried to be stoical and put his job in perspective. ‘I don’t see fashion as curing cancer or AIDS – or anything else, for that matter,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day, they are just clothes.’81
Chapter Eight
‘You know, we can all be discarded quite easily’
Lee McQueen
On 1 December 1996, Hedingham Castle in Essex was the setting for an extraordinary photo shoot. A fire was staged inside the building and as the flames appeared to lick the walls of the twelfth-century stone keep, Lee McQueen and Isabella Blow posed in the foreground for the American photographer David LaChapelle. The resulting picture still startles: Lee, dressed in a black corset, long red leather gloves and a generous ochre-coloured skirt, and holding a flaming torch, opens his mouth to shout. Isabella, wearing a beautiful, funnel-necked, pale pink cheongsam and a red, lozenge-shaped Philip Treacy hat, holds the tip of McQueen’s gown as she kicks her left leg up in the air. In the background, a horse equipped for battle rears upwards as a dead or injured knight in armour lies by its side. On the far right-hand side of the grass, a human skull both suggests the atrocities that have been committed in the past and also serves as an omen for the tragedies of the future.
The shoot had been commissioned by Vanity Fair for its twenty-five-page special report, ‘London Swings Again’. The magazine, which featured an image of Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit lying on a Union Jack bed on its cover, investigated the phenomenon of what it called ‘Cool Britannia’, a heady blend of genuine cultural excitement and over-hyped media invention. ‘As it was in the mid-sixties, the British capital is a cultural trailblazer, teeming with new and youthful icons of art, pop music, fashion, food, and film,’ it said. In addition to McQueen and Blow, the magazine photographed and interviewed Damien Hirst, Jodie Kidd, Terence Conran, the Spice Girls, restaurateur Oliver Peyton, the head of Creation Records Alan McGee, Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Loaded editor James Brown, Damon Albarn from Blur, Nick Hornby and Tony Blair (whose New Labour party would win the general election in May 1997). ‘The hope that change will bring is outweighing the fear of change,’ said Blair, whose choice of song during the campaign was D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.1
The Vanity Fair issue was a response to an influential cover feature in Newsweek, published at the beginning of November 1996 and written by Stryker McGuire. The opening sentence of that article traced the birth of London as ‘the coolest city on the planet’ to the moment ‘two weeks ago, when the grand Paris fashion houses Givenchy and Dior decided to install two brash young London designers as their top couturiers’.2
Certainly, McGuire, who had first come to Britain in the early eighties, noticed a difference in London when he returned in 1996. The ‘drab place with great history, poor heating and worse food’ had been transformed. The banking industry was booming, ‘sheer energy . . . crackled through the Square Mile’ and money flowed between London and New York; the art scene was thriving and ‘some London art dealers and collectors, such as Jay Jopling and Charles Saatchi, were more famous than their artists’; architecture was experiencing something of a golden age (the week before the Newsweek piece ran plans were announced for the building of ‘a glorious Ferris wheel on the Thames’, now the London Eye); Eurostar, which entered service in 1994, ‘brought the continent right into the heart of London’; and clubs such as Ministry of Sound ‘were pulling in young people from Europe and beyond’.3
Isabella Blow had been commissioned by Vanity Fair to work on the issue as a freelance consultant. Although the owners of Hedingham Castle, the Lindsays, had been reluctant to let it out for film or photographic projects, Isabella and Detmar used their connections with the family to secure its use for Vanity Fair. ‘Issie told me that Lee had said, “Who is the most expensive photographer? David LaChapelle – we will get him to shoot us,”’ remembers Detmar. ‘Issie loved this strategy. It made her laugh. It was classic chutzpah, clever, defiant and proud. The title of the photograph was Burning Down the House, which was so true to them both.’4 Isabella would have noticed the resemblance between the keep at Hedingham Castle and the medieval castle that stood in the grounds of her ancestral home at Doddington Park, which she had explored as a child. ‘Issie loved to play in this perilous, weed-filled tower, conducting dramatic re-creations of medieval rites and myths with her sisters as willing or unwilling participants,’ wrote Detmar. ‘The tower was a formative element in Issie’s medieval aesthetic.’5 The shoot functioned as an extension of the games Isabella played as a girl, and she would have been thrilled that she could cast McQueen in the role of a transgressive medieval drag queen. However, ‘Lee’s mother, Joyce, was upset by Lee wearing a dress,’ said Detmar.6
Isabella had also managed to persuade Lee to grant an interview to Vanity Fair writer David Kamp. ‘McQueen was a hot media commodity at the time, arrogant and disinclined to give press interviews,’ said Kamp, ‘so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a sit-down.’ Unfortunately, Kamp had come down with flu, and perhaps without thinking started the interview with the question, ‘You’re obviously not from a wealthy background so I wanted to know if––’, at which point McQueen interrupted, ‘What do you mean, obviously?! What a snobby thing to say.’ The designer stood up and demanded to know what kind of writer Kamp was since he obviously didn’t know much about fashion. ‘Look, I know I’m not Amy Spindler [the New York Times fashion critic],’ said Kamp, at which point McQueen began to soften a little. ‘I love Amy Spindler,’ he said. ‘Let me show you some things I showed her.’ McQueen confessed that he too was feeling a little under the weather, ‘which accounted for at least some of the irritability’, said Kamp, and the interview resumed.
Kamp described McQueen as a man with ‘buzz-cut hair, a dome of belly visible under his sweater, and little button eyes set atop huge, Muppety cheeks, making him, despite his gruffness, adorable’.7 The designe
r told the Vanity Fair writer that he was influenced by everything around him, even sights that most people would find anathema to fashion. For instance, he had recently spotted a tramp with a string tied around his coat, an image that inspired him to copy the vagrant’s silhouette and create a version of the garment with Mongolian-fur collar and cuffs and a belt instead of a piece of string. ‘I wasn’t laughing at him,’ Lee said. ‘Who should be laughing? My coat costs £1,200, his cost nothing.’8
At one point during the meeting, which was held inside Lee’s studio, ‘an unmarked, graffiti-covered building’, Kamp told McQueen about a speech made by John Major, on 11 November 1996, at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet.9 Towards the end of his speech the Prime Minister had referred to the Newsweek article as evidence that the country, particularly London, was experiencing something of a creative explosion, and had said, ‘Our country has taken over the fashion catwalks of Paris,’ a clear reference to Galliano’s and McQueen’s appointments. ‘Did he say that?’ responded McQueen. ‘Ah, fucking plank! I’m not one of his own! He didn’t get me there, the fucker! Fuck him! So fucking typical of government! They do nothing to help you when you’re trying to do something, then take credit when you’re a success! Fuck off!’10
Lee and Murray Arthur spent Christmas Day 1996 at the loft in Hoxton Square since the house in Coleman Fields was still being renovated. That Christmas the building was empty, but as Lee started to cook he began to hear strange noises. ‘Then the fridge door slammed really hard shut,’ said Murray. ‘Lee thought that I had come out of the shower and shoved it, but I was still in the shower. Later, we heard footsteps above us and he made me go and have a look. I had to go out the back door to the metal staircase, but it was pitch black and I couldn’t see anything. I came down and told him that there were no lights on. He was so scared we had to go to the vicarage on Hoxton Square and knocked on the door and asked if the vicar could come and exorcise the flat.’11 Lee also telephoned Mira, who was staying with her boyfriend, and begged her to come home. ‘It was well known the loft was haunted,’ she said. ‘Friends didn’t want to come over and I think Lee heard things. There were a few people who saw stuff, like a black figure of a man with no face, almost like a paper cut-out in the shape of a man. It would appear in the hallway by the loo. Also, we could never get the place warm whatever we did. I spent a fortune, but nothing could keep that place warm. I learnt that the building used to be a furniture finishing factory. The men who were working on the Blue Note building across the street told me that one day they had been working in my loft and went back and all the tools that they had laid out had been reversed.’12
In February 1997, Lee and Murray moved into their new house. The couple went shopping for furniture to SCP – a contemporary design store in Hoxton – for an expensive Matthew Hilton leather chair and sofa, which Murray subsequently spilled Chinese take-away on, and to an antique dealer from whom they bought a beautiful, French seventeenth-century carved wooden bed. ‘Lee had one room just for his clothes,’ said Mira.13
Five days after his first Givenchy show McQueen got the opportunity to experience what it was like to be a model when Rei Kawakubo asked him to walk down the catwalk for her menswear show at the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie in Paris. The clothes – baggy tartan trousers and light cream suits filled with wadding between the layers – stretched over McQueen’s bulky frame making it look, in the words of fashion journalist Stephen Todd, as though he was wearing an outfit cut from a white duvet, a look that was ‘not particularly slimming’. Todd had been assigned to interview McQueen for the Australian gay magazine Blue and Lee had so little time to spare – he was heading straight back to London that day – that he had to talk to him backstage at the show. McQueen was, Todd remembers, ‘extremely polite, not self-consciously so, but naturally so,’ he said. ‘This may appear a facile comment, but consider the context: the kid’s not long been in the spotlight, is extremely conscious of his weight, about to walk out in front of a room of his critics looking like a boudin blanc, and is in the presence of his uncontested idol, Rei Kawakubo, who is quietly prepping the show alongside him. He took the time to speak with me, gave lengthy, considered and coherent answers, thanked me for my time, and ten minutes later there he was on the catwalk.’
Over the course of that year the two became friends – Stephen was based in Paris and so whenever Lee came over to work in the French capital the pair would meet up. ‘He was calm, centred, not interested in the air-kissy side of things,’ said Stephen. ‘Physically imposing, he appeared tough, but on second glance there was an evident softness to him. It’s this softness I found most touching. It may have been the recognition of working-class lads, but we seemed to bond surprisingly easily, with no agenda. But this was before he’d entered the big business area of Paris fashion. In those days we used to hang out at quite louche gay bars, since I was one of the few Anglophones he knew who lived in Paris full-time. He’d been given an apartment near the Place des Vosges, and would joke about kitting it out with Ikea to upset Arnault and his cronies. I also cheered on his underdog, two-finger salute to authority; again, that may be working-class recognition. But equally, I recognized all too well that he could be his own worst enemy in such matters. I remember going to meet him, not long after he’d taken over at Givenchy, and him walking out into the courtyard, cursing the atelier up on the sixth floor, seeing them as an entrenched expression of a faded French way of doing things, but also as Arnault’s army.’14
At this time Lee also told Stephen, who wrote a feature for Blueprint magazine on McQueen and Galliano, about one of the real reasons he had been appointed at Givenchy: publicity. ‘Let’s not bullshit around, the haute couture’s not about selling clothes,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows it’s purely about selling perfume and all that other stuff.’ As Todd outlined in the piece, ‘Arnault understood early on that as haughty as fashion may be, it’s the tons of sunglasses, scarves, handbags and perfumes that get cash registers swinging. And it’s the high profile of the marque which keeps the schmutter turning over.’ Todd also interviewed Stéphane Wargnier, professor and lecturer in communication at the Institut Français de la Mode, who said, ‘If we accept that much of haute couture is about squeezing out maximum media coverage – good or bad – then the more spectacular the collection and presentation, the better. And from that point of view the English are the best by far.’15
In February 1997, Patsy Kensit asked McQueen to ‘knock up a short-order wedding dress’16 for her forthcoming nuptials to boyfriend and fellow Vanity Fair cover star Liam Gallagher (the couple married on 7 April that year but the relationship, like the ‘Cool Britannia’ phenomenon itself, eventually turned sour). Although Lee said he was too busy – he had two collections to finish before the second week of March – he did invite the couple to his London show for his own label at the end of the month. Called It’s a Jungle Out There, the show grew out of images he had seen in the National Geographic magazine. ‘I think he found this pile of National Geographics in a Sue Ryder charity shop for fifty pence or something,’ said Simon Costin, McQueen’s art director. Specifically, Lee was drawn to the plight of the Thomson’s gazelle. ‘It’s a poor little critter – the markings are lovely, it’s got these dark eyes, the white of the belly and black with the tan markings on the side, the horns – but it is in the food chain of Africa,’ he said. ‘As soon as it’s born it’s dead, I mean you’re lucky if it lasts a few months, and that’s how I see human life, in the same way. You know, we can all be discarded quite easily. Nothing depicts it more than animals. I was also trying to say the fragility of the designer’s time in the press. You’re there, you’re gone. It’s a jungle out there.’17 He also compared himself to the Thomson’s gazelle. ‘Someone’s chasing after me all the time, and if I’m caught, they’ll pull me down,’ he said. ‘Fashion is a jungle full of nasty, bitchy hyenas.’18
But the creatures that McQueen sent out onto the catwalk on the night of 27 February 1997 w
ere not ones that a spectator would describe as either vulnerable or victim-like. The hybrids that stalked the runway – half-women, half-gazelles – had the ferocity of predators. ‘The idea is that this wildebeest has eaten this really lovely blonde girl and she’s trying to get out,’ he said.19
The week leading up to the show was even more tense than normal. Katy England, who kept a diary of the preparations, had to find men and women to model who could communicate a certain aggressive quality. She called in some girls on Friday 21 February and asked them to walk for her. ‘The way they walk is really important,’ she said. ‘They must be able to carry off the clothes, as well as being beautiful . . . We need strong, ballsy girls. The boys are more complicated; we don’t want modelly types, we want guys who are weird, brutish and extreme-looking,’ and so she employed someone to scour the streets for her. The men’s clothes arrived from Italy on Sunday and that day she and Lee styled them. ‘He likes to get more involved with the way the men wear his stuff, because he styles it the way a bloke would wear it,’ she said. The studio had to cope with the presence of a TV crew – the BBC were making a documentary called ‘Cutting Up Rough’ for The Works series – and a journalist from Details magazine. ‘Lee and I had to get out of the studio for some fresh air it was so mad,’ Katy said. She discussed the men’s grooming with Mira Chai Hyde, and the two women decided that the men would all wear nail varnish and eyeliner to give them a bruised look. Katy also heard that two models, Esther de Jong and Carolyn Murphy, could not make it for the show as they had been booked to work in New York. ‘But Naomi Campbell is looking good . . . I’m not sure about Kate Moss,’ she said. That day half of the women’s clothes arrived from the manufacturer, but they were all creased.
Alexander McQueen Page 20
