The outlandish hairstyles were also something that had never been seen on a couture catwalk before. ‘Wound into wheels or piled into overgrown compost heaps or, in one case, coiled into a blonde ziggurat so tall it was hard for the woman to get her coif under a transom and into the back gallery,’ wrote Chip Brown in New York magazine. One straw hat comprised a bird cage, with a live songbird inside, while another ‘poor model had to navigate the route with her head and face completely cloaked in a red chador, though she seemed much more at ease than her comrade Honor Fraser, carrying a hooded falcon on a couture glove’. Brown concluded that the imagery . . . a range of contradictory responses: ‘animality, power, helplessness, degradation and sovereignty, and otherwise suggests confusion in the categories of predator and prey’.54
McQueen had experienced each of these states of being. He was at once the mad surgeon, dissecting the traditions of fashion and reconstructing the fragments to create a whole new look, and a victim, an object of abuse and exploitation who sometimes felt like he had come back from the dead. The feelings of disembodiment that occasionally threatened to destabilize him could only be held at bay for so long. His strategy for survival centred on replaying his deep-seated fears and fantasies relating to power and sex; each of his shows served as a cathartic purging of these feelings. Wasn’t couture supposed to make women feel wonderful, not weird? asked Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune the day after Eclect Dissect. Menkes, for once, had missed the point. McQueen did not produce these clothes for women, rather he created them for himself, as a rather public form of therapy. As such his shows can be read as the visual equivalent of fairy-tales, a genre through which creator and consumer alike can express cultural anxieties and private desires. ‘I’m about what goes through people’s minds, the stuff that people don’t want to admit or face up to,’ he said. ‘The shows are about what’s buried in people’s psyches.’55
After the show, Lee and Murray decided to escape the oppressive heat of Paris. Together with their former flatmate Mira Chai Hyde, they travelled to Pennan, on the coast of Aberdeenshire, where they rented a cottage. They lived simply, cooking meals and playing dominoes in the evenings. On 15 July 1997, while still in Scotland, they heard the news that Gianni Versace had been shot and killed. Six weeks later, on the morning of 31 August, the phone rang in the house in Coleman Fields; the couple were still in bed and so Murray leant over Lee to answer it. It was Joyce McQueen asking them whether they had seen the news. She simply told them to switch on the television and then hung up. Like millions of other people, Lee was left in a state of shock by the news of the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in Paris. He had told Murray that she was the only member of the Royal Family he would consider making a dress for. ‘When Diana died he cried. He was terribly heartbroken for days afterwards,’ remembers his sister Jacqui.56
To McQueen, death seemed not so much a distant stranger as an ever-present spectre. ‘It is important to look at death because it is part of life,’ he said. ‘It is a sad thing, melancholic but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle – everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things.’57
Towards the end of 1997 the relationship between Lee and Murray began to deteriorate. ‘Givenchy started to weigh him down,’ said Murray. ‘He would go to Paris on his own and we would have arguments on the phone over nothing.’58
Then in September, when Murray was away, Lee went to The End, a club in West Central Street, London, and met 21-year-old Archie Reed. There was an instant attraction between them – Archie was blond, good-looking, had been married and had a daughter – and that night they went back to the house in Coleman Fields together. ‘I liked everything about him,’ said Archie. ‘We were from the East End of London and we spoke the same language, and knew the same people. There was never any bullshit, that’s what we both liked. We quickly realized that we had met years before, when Lee had been working in Reflections, the bar in Stratford.’ The couple’s relationship stretched over the course of the next twelve years, but it would be punctuated by long periods, often years, apart. Nevertheless, Archie believed he knew Lee better than most people. ‘He seemed to have so many different personalities – there was the old lady down the bingo; an old man that liked checking out the dirty old girls; the old tart; the rent boy; the little boy lost. But the Lee you would see out was not the Lee you would see at home, that little boy in his pyjamas watching X Factor, who was as sweet and as loving as could be.’59
In December, Lee and Murray were invited to the premiere of Titanic, the film starring Kate Winslet, but they decided to go to a dinner hosted by Donatella Versace instead. ‘We had a massive argument before the dinner even started and left,’ said Murray. ‘I can’t remember why or what happened, but I think it was because I wanted to see the film and he didn’t. In the end we didn’t see the film and we didn’t have dinner with Donatella.’60
Murray had stopped working at McQueen and had found it difficult to find another job; he had been overspending for some time and his overdraft amounted to more than his yearly salary. ‘I felt really low, I was missing Lee and upset that things weren’t going as they had been,’ he said. One day they had a ‘massive screaming match on the phone’; Lee was in Paris and Murray at home in north London. ‘I took the biggest overdose of tablets I could lay my hands on,’ washed down with a lot of vodka and gin. ‘I took an overdose because I didn’t think my life was worth anything at the time,’ he said. He remembers feeling spaced-out and nauseous, but then looked up to see Minter staring at him, a sight which prompted him to call for an ambulance. He was taken to Homerton Hospital where he had his stomach pumped. When Lee discovered what he had done ‘he was really upset and didn’t want to speak to me’, said Murray. ‘I came back, packed a bag and went straight to my parents’ house in Scotland. I didn’t talk to them, I went to my bedroom and shut the door.’ After a week in Scotland, Murray returned to London and moved his things out of the house in Coleman Fields. He went to stay at a friend’s place in Camberwell. At the time he was so poor that he made a soup, eked out from a bag of frozen vegetables, last him a week. ‘I went from having everything to nothing,’ he said.61
Apart from when Lee sent Murray a card that read, ‘I hope you find what you are looking for,’ the couple had no contact for the next month or so.62 Then, one night, McQueen rang Murray and told him that he missed him and wanted to see him. They started seeing one another again for a while – although Murray never moved back into Lee’s house – but after a few months they decided that the relationship was over.
Years later, Murray felt irritated that people kept asking him why he still had ‘McQueen’ tattooed on his arm. He talked to a designer friend about it who advised him to have it inked out with a black band. But then, after having it done, he felt that the image, a symbol of mourning, looked too depressing and asked a tattoo artist to lighten it by the addition of a Keith Haring design.
‘I loved Lee more than anything else in the world and I would never have done anything to hurt him,’ said Murray. ‘He was my first love and he will be my only love. I was in it because of Lee, not Alexander, McQueen.’63
Chapter Nine
‘He was the kind of daredevil that looks death and birth straight in the eye’
Björk
There was a moment, precisely seventeen minutes into Untitled, Lee’s Spring/Summer 1998 show for his own label, when McQueen secured his place as a contemporary artist of some note. The audience of 2,000 people, who had gathered on the evening of Sunday 28 September 1997 at the Gatliff Road bus depot in Victoria, were intrigued as the loud club music that had accompanied the first part of the show began to fade, and silence settled over the brutal interior of the industrial building. Then the sound of intermittent drops of rain was broadcast over the PA system, together with a soulful refrain from Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, spliced together with the threatening deep bass notes of John Wil
liams’s theme from Jaws. The catwalk, a long transparent Perspex box filled with water and lit underneath by ultraviolet light, started to darken with black ink, oozing from an invisible source. By the time the runway had turned black a yellow sleet of rain had started to fall from above and as the models, all wearing white, walked forwards their clothes became soaked with water and their make-up and mascara ran down their faces.
Simon Costin, who designed the set of Untitled with McQueen, regarded the show as a piece of installation art, and many others agreed. ‘It’s not just the clothes McQueen is good at, it’s everything . . . the environment, the theatricality,’ said the photographer Mario Testino, who was in the audience, along with Janet Jackson, Demi Moore, and Honor Fraser.1 ‘The man’s a creative genius,’ said Tommy Hilfiger, who watched with his wife and daughter.2
Of course, the clothes on display were extraordinary, ‘carved rather than cut from traditional tailoring fabrics, from pinstripe and Prince of Wales check, fused together to produce torso-skimming jackets’.3 There was a white muslin corset dress, its train dragging through the water, worn by Kate Moss. There were figure-hugging spiral dresses made from python skin, pinstripe jackets that revealed deep cowls at the back, finely tailored skirts and corsets worn by musclemen. And there was a suede bodice sliced into strips so as to reveal the breasts, worn by Stella Tennant. But there was something else at work, too. McQueen had commissioned a number of unsettling additions, pieces of body sculpture that redefined the concept of the accessory. Jeweller Sarah Harmarnee made a number of harnesses, fashioned from silver-plated metal, while McQueen’s friend Shaun Leane constructed a spine corset made from aluminium. When Shaun initially heard Lee’s idea he thought his friend had gone mad, but McQueen had been right – it could be done. ‘Sky’s the limit,’ he would say.4 But it was the accessories and the staging – particularly the juxtaposition of the Perspex tank filling with sinister ink and the nasty yellow rain that fell from the heavens – that lifted this event beyond the realms of a conventional fashion show.
In fact, in September 1997, Untitled would not have looked out of place within the hallowed confines of London’s Royal Academy. Ten days before McQueen’s show, the RA on Piccadilly opened the controversial Sensation exhibition – a display of contemporary art from the collection of Charles Saatchi. Works on show included Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (the famous shark in formaldehyde); Marc Quinn’s self-portrait of a frozen head made from pints of his own blood; Tracey Emin’s tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995; Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad, an uncanny sculpture of the artist’s father; the disturbing work of Jake and Dinos Chapman; and the most headline-grabbing of them all, Myra, Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the serial killer Myra Hindley made from a child’s handprints.
McQueen had initially wanted to call his show ‘Golden Showers’ but the sponsor, American Express, who gave the designer £30,000 towards the reported £70,000 it cost to stage, objected to the risqué title. ‘Lee just got so angry with that,’ said Simon Costin. ‘He said to Steve Chivers [who was in charge of the lighting], “I want that water to look like piss.”’5 Although he and other designers – such as Lee’s former boyfriend Andrew Groves, whose show that same day featured Hellraiser-style suits, an outfit that opened to reveal 500 live flies, and perhaps the most prophetic of all, a hangman’s noose – deliberately set out to shock, in McQueen’s case that quest for sensation was balanced by a new maturity that thrilled the fashion critics. ‘His presentation late Sunday night was literally slick and entirely sophisticated,’ said Women’s Wear Daily. ‘Sure, there were still a few theatrical moments, since it wouldn’t be a McQueen show without them. But what he mainly produced was an immensely, totally wearable collection.’6
McQueen’s social life now straddled the worlds of fashion, art and celebrity. On 9 September, he had attended the launch of Damien Hirst’s book I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now at Quo Vadis, the restaurant the artist co-owned on Dean Street. Guests included Kylie Minogue, Keith Allen, Stephen Fry, Kate Moss, Robbie Williams, Bob Geldof and Malcolm McLaren. But he confessed that his social life was not as fun as it once was, in the days when he had hung out with his Old Compton Street friends. ‘I hate the circles I mix in now, I really hate them,’ he said. ‘The wankers you meet; the insular people you meet. I’m a great believer in honesty and I don’t think you get that in fashion.’7 Certainly, A. A. Gill, the Sunday Times writer whose report on London Fashion Week was published the same day as McQueen’s show, was scathing in his attack on the business. He described the circus of shows as a ‘thick shove and swelter of loathing’. No other industry, he said, ‘is as swagged and encrusted with so much snide, bitter frustration and resentment, and with so many broken dreams and squandered promises. Here, for one whole week, you can find clothes made by men who hate women, women who hate women, and women who hate themselves.’8
In private, Lee had started to talk to friends about the possibility of moving away from fashion, a yearning that he would continue to articulate until the very end of his life. Perhaps he would become a photojournalist and report from war zones, he said. Some friends thought he should concentrate on the contemporary art aspect of his shows and devote himself to making installation pieces or video art. In February 1997, McQueen had collaborated with Nick Knight on an image of the young Japanese/American model Devon Aoki for Visionaire, guest-edited by Rei Kawakubo. McQueen had dressed Devon in the same pink funnel-necked dress that Isabella Blow had worn for the Vanity Fair shoot, but this time he had gone one step further, styling her with one milky white eye and a huge safety pin through her forehead. After seeing the startling image, the London art dealer Anthony d’Offay got in touch with Knight and McQueen and asked them whether they wanted to work on an exhibition together at his gallery. The friends were intrigued by the idea, but rejected it because, they said, they wanted to stage an exhibition in New York. Björk also saw the futuristic image in Visionaire and commissioned McQueen to art-direct the cover for her album Homogenic, released in September 1997. The image, taken by Nick Knight, shows the Icelandic singer recast as an older sister of Devon Aoki, a stylized Samurai warrior who has returned from a tour of the globe. ‘I had ten kilos of hair on my head, and special contact lenses and a manicure that prevented me from eating with my fingers, and gaffer tape around my waist and high clogs so I couldn’t walk easily,’ said Björk.9
McQueen and Björk shared many interests and obsessions, particularly a fascination with nature. ‘He was the kind of daredevil that looks death and birth straight in the eye,’ she said later. ‘Lee managed to connect not only with the civilized part of his culture but somehow channel beyond that a more primordial energy, which is probably where me and him met.’10 In 1998, McQueen would direct the video of Björk’s single ‘Alarm Call’, in which she was filmed floating on a raft in a jungle and living in close harmony with various exotic creatures such as crocodiles; in one shot she caresses a snake between her thighs. ‘I’ve done loads of collections based on man and machine and man and nature, but ultimately my work is always in some way directed by nature,’ McQueen told Björk in 2003. ‘It needs to connect with the earth. Things that are processed and reprocessed lose their substance.’11
But dreams of escaping the fashion bubble for the world of pure art eluded Lee. He was simply too busy, he said, or there were too many people who depended on him. In reality, the gaps between his collections were so short that it was difficult for him to find time off. For instance, in the autumn of 1997 there were only two weeks between Untitled and his next haute couture show for Givenchy. On 22 October, McQueen won his second British Designer of the Year award, one he shared with John Galliano. Gossips speculated on why Galliano had not attended the ceremony at the Albert Hall. When Jasper Gerard of The Times’ diary pages asked Galliano’s office about this a spokesperson said that the designer was ‘busy in
Paris’. ‘Odd, then, that an acquaintance should have stumbled across him round the corner, drowning his sorrows at a local bar with the equally antisocial frock-maker Vivienne Westwood,’ said Gerard.12
Although it was reported that LVMH chief Bernard Arnault wanted to extend McQueen’s two-year contract, the reviews in the press for Lee’s Givenchy show that October were some of the worst of the designer’s career. Brenda Polan in the Financial Times described the clothes as a mix between Dolly Parton at her most garish, the Folies Bergères and Dynasty done to excess. ‘His befringed, diamante-dotted, patent leather-trimmed body-flaunting could be construed as a bid to recruit the bereft customers of the late Gianni Versace,’ she said. ‘For these were clothes only rock-chicks, footballers’ wives and exhibitionists with fat trust funds could love.’13
It was easy for McQueen to laugh off the comments of 88-year-old Sir Hardy Amies, who wrote a piece in the Spectator attacking McQueen at Givenchy and Galliano at Dior. Their work was nothing less than ‘terrible’, he said, and it was no wonder that reportedly their employees were in despair. ‘It is rumoured, not loudly, but everyone knows it, that the owners of these names don’t really want couture business,’ he said. ‘They want to sell stockings and scent. They are prepared to spend a lot of money advertising their names and are glad of the publicity that catwalk shows can generate.’ Amies had also heard that many previously loyal customers of the two couture houses had started to shift their allegiance to Saint Laurent or Balmain. ‘If Givenchy and Dior continue with “flash” designers, I fear this is where their customers will stay,’ he said.14 Yet it was more difficult for McQueen to ignore the criticisms of someone like the Sunday Times fashion writer Colin McDowell, who hated the designer’s latest look. ‘Crude colours, including searing orange, can be found on any provincial market stall,’ he wrote. ‘Fringed leather is a sempiternal horror story in cheap fashion chains.’ Not only did the collection fail to appeal to existing customers of Givenchy, but why would any woman who had money want to go out of her way to look so cheap? McDowell acknowledged that McQueen had enormous talent, but on this occasion it seemed as though he had worked himself into a dead end. And the worst of it was that ‘there seemed to be no new ideas’.15 In January 1998, just days before McQueen’s next couture show, Hubert de Givenchy himself let it be known that he thought the designer’s work at the house had been ‘a total disaster’.16
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