In the run-up to his February show, Joan, for his own label, McQueen’s office banned the Sun newspaper, together with a number of other tabloid newspapers and GMTV, from attending because apparently they represented ‘the wrong sort of audience’. The news infuriated Sun columnist Jane Moore who wrote of the fact that McQueen had come from working-class parents who regularly read her paper. ‘Their son is so far up his own bottom, I’m surprised he can still see daylight,’ she wrote. ‘Clothes are not works of art. They exist solely for the purpose of being worn . . . He is often appallingly rude to people, priding himself as the “devil child” of the fashion world.’17
McQueen, feeling stressed and under increased pressure to produce, also began to behave in a more tyrannical manner towards his staff. Simon Costin had already noticed the change in Lee’s behaviour in 1997. When they were in Paris the team would often go to the club Le Queen to relax after a long day’s – and evening’s – work. As McQueen became more famous so his treatment improved until eventually he and his staff were directed towards a roped-off VIP area. ‘Lee was quite shy, so that was quite nice for him, but it wasn’t so much fun for us,’ said Simon. ‘That was the first time that it was becoming apparent that it was difficult for Lee to lead the sort of life he had led before,’ he said. Simon also remembers an incident, when McQueen was still with Murray, when after one of the Paris shows the team were whisked away to a private room in an upmarket hotel. He was enjoying a cuddle with his boyfriend when Murray, acting on McQueen’s behalf, walked over and said to him, ‘“Simon, that’s not what’s expected.” That’s when I thought, “Oh God, where’s the rebel gone?” Lee started to be recognized and was pestered when we were out by people wanting work, or people just being sycophantic. He started to change in his dealings with other staff, people he’d known for a long time. I noticed that if anyone stepped out of line, you were brought up quite sharply. You’d go into the studio and ask, “Where’s so and so?” and they had gone. On the one level it was an incredibly intense experience, and the work was extraordinary, but all that comes with a cost. I suddenly realized that I didn’t like it any more. I thought I was next to get the chop and so I wrote him a letter which outlined why it wasn’t working any more, that he wanted me to go anyway, that I thought it was for the best – “but you are a bit of a nightmare.” Apparently, he was absolutely livid – “he can’t talk to me like this,” was his attitude – and he read it out to everybody in the London studio. I didn’t see him for years after that.’18
Lee’s friend, Miguel Adrover, also remembers times when McQueen would lose his temper, especially in the frenzied weeks leading up to a show. ‘Yes, he was a shy person, but at the same time he could be really vicious,’ he said. ‘Lee could be a crazy person with no feelings and sometimes he said, “If you don’t have it [a piece] finished for tomorrow you will get fired, bitch.”’ Miguel would try and restore his friend’s sense of perspective and force him to acknowledge that he wasn’t the most important person in the universe. One time, when the two went on holiday to Majorca, Miguel took him around the village where he had grown up. He escorted him to the house of an old lady, dressed in black, who was sitting on the bench outside. Miguel asked the woman, ‘I have Alexander McQueen here – do you want to meet him?’ ‘Who the fuck is this?’ she replied. ‘And so I told him what she had told me and said, “Not everyone knows you, they don’t give a shit about you.”’
Lee decided to dedicate Joan to Miguel because, at that time, he felt particularly close to him. ‘We had this connection that he didn’t have with many people,’ Miguel said. ‘He didn’t trust many people – when you start to get fame and money you start to get a little paranoid.’19 Perhaps it was also McQueen’s way of thanking his friend for looking after him on his visits to New York. Instead of staying in the room booked for him at a smart hotel, Lee would prefer to spend time with Miguel at his grotty basement apartment on Third Street, between First and Second Avenues. People from the nearby blocks would regularly throw their trash down into the space between the buildings and although the flat had one window Miguel would never allow it to be opened as he was afraid the rats outside would spill into his home. Whenever it rained the apartment would flood and Miguel would have to make sure nothing was left on the floor. ‘But Lee loved this,’ said Miguel. ‘He was always in the search of real things and real friendship – authentic connections were really important to him. He associated the hotels with work.’
Miguel served another function too: he would pay the rent boys ordered up by McQueen. ‘Lee was a really shy person and he thought that if he went out people would want to meet him for who he was in the public eye, not the real him.’ One day, after he had heard Lee complaining about this, Miguel gave him a booklet featuring a series of rent boys, their photographs and prices. ‘Lee would choose the one he wanted to spend time with, I would call them and they would come to the basement,’ said Miguel. ‘He would give me the money to pay them. I remember once, after he had finished, he shouted out to me, “Sweetheart, can you make me a cup of tea?”’20
At the beginning of 1998 all Lee’s attention was taken up with his new collection, Joan. The show, held on 25 February at the Gatliff Road bus depot, was inspired not only by Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake in 1431, but also by an image of Agnès Sorel by the French artist Jean Fouquet. The two women had devoted themselves to the French king Charles VII – Joan as a self-sacrificial spiritual leader and Agnès as his mistress and mother of three illegitimate children. Both women had died serving him – Joan at the stake and Agnès, in 1450, after giving birth, a death which was later thought to have been a result of mercury poisoning. McQueen chose an image of Agnès from Fouquet’s Melun Diptych, Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, painted around 1452, as the image for the show’s glossy invitation. Fouquet portrayed the virgin (Agnès) wearing a dark grey bodice that exposed her left breast, and with a high, pale forehead, showing a glimpse of a curled plait that sat just below her crown, an aesthetic that determined the look of McQueen’s show. Although Lee – who had just dyed his hair blond – initially wanted to send the models out looking completely bald, the hair stylist Guido Palau thought this would be too severe. ‘I was not sure about that, so we agreed on a high hairline,’ he said. Many of the models’ heads were covered with bald caps and draped with thin blond woven plaits, while their eyes were fitted with blood-red contact lenses, a look described by McQueen’s make-up artist Val Garland as ‘Joan of Arc kidnapped by aliens’.21
But the abiding image of the show, one that would be branded into the consciousness of those who watched it, was the finale. In this last scene a model wearing a breathtaking dress fashioned from red bugle beads and a red mask stepped on to the stage alone and was surrounded by a ring of fire. At that moment the anonymous female figure, wearing a blood-red dress and standing defiant on stage as the flames raged around her, became a symbol of the McQueen everywoman: resilient, strong, a survivor of unknown horrors. As McQueen progressed through life he had found himself drawn to a series of women who had endured physical, sexual or psychological torment and, as a fellow survivor of abuse himself, he felt he could understand them.
McQueen’s latest muse was Annabelle Neilson, whom he had chosen to model in Dante and Joan. She had come from a wealthy background – her father was an investment and property adviser and her mother, a marquessa, a society interior designer – but she was far from conventional. She attended Cobham Hall in Kent but left school at sixteen without any ‘O’ Levels due to a combination of her dyslexia and her rebellious spirit; apparently she stayed in bed on the day of her exams. In 1995 she married Nat Rothschild, the hedge fund manager with a reported fortune of £270 million, but by the time Annabelle walked down the catwalk in Joan the marriage was in trouble and the couple divorced in 1998. It was reported that, as part of the generous divorce settlement, Annabelle had to give up using the Rothschild name and agree never to talk publicly about the marriage.
Isabella Blow had first introduced McQueen to the model-thin Annabelle. Isabella ‘was always shoving girls in his face, but he could tell I wasn’t desperate to be a model,’ said Annabelle. ‘He took off my clothes, said he admired my filthy vocabulary, and agreed to dress me for a Paolo Roversi portrait. He also asked me to be in his show. I would have done anything he asked just to be around him. I found his energy magnetic.’22 McQueen made his first wedding dress for Annabelle, who had a more formal ceremony in London after her marriage to Nat Rothschild in Las Vegas in November 1995. ‘It’s more difficult [than a runway collection],’ said McQueen about designing a wedding dress, a creation that is ‘immortalized in photographs in a way that no other garment ever is’.23
By 1998, the relationship between Lee and Isabella had started to change. ‘It’s like vampires,’ said Isabella, trying to make light of the weakening bond between them, ‘you need somebody and then you don’t need the drug any more.’24 John Maybury, who was friends with both Issie and Lee, described this as ‘a natural parting of the ways, but it would be a mistake to think that at any point he ceased to love her’.25
Isabella was no longer the most important female friend in his life; that role had been taken over by Annabelle. ‘Isabella had scooped up what looked like this wounded bird and introduced her to Alexander,’ said Daphne Guinness, another close friend of both Isabella’s and Lee’s. ‘And the wounded bird turned into a bird that nudged everybody else out of the nest. Isabella wasn’t at all competitive about her friends, and she never said it in a bad way, but she was disappointed in herself. She did say that that was the worst introduction she had ever made.’26
Friends noticed the not-so-subtle shift in the dynamic between Lee and Isabella. ‘At times he could be dismissive of her and make fun of her,’ said BillyBoy*. ‘He treated her very badly and at times it was so gross I thought, “How can he say that?” But there was a sort of psycho-sexual relationship between the two of them. She was completely enamoured of him and his work and I think he wanted to punish her. There was something deeply masochistic in his personality – that’s why he always liked guys who treated him badly. I think by punishing her, he punished himself. Inside there was a certain cognitive dissonance – by hurting her he got a joy out of it, but at the same time he hurt himself.’27
Isabella’s husband, Detmar, remembers an occasion from May 1997 when McQueen had visited Hilles, along with a BBC film crew. The two men were sitting by themselves in the long room after supper, a fire blazed away in the hearth and Detmar was enjoying a cigar. Then, McQueen turned to him and said, ‘I’m the tycoon now, Detmar.’ ‘He wasn’t laughing, he was saying I’m more powerful than you,’ Detmar recalls. The incident made him think of the scene in Henry IV Part Two where the King turns to Falstaff and says, ‘I know thee not, old man.’ The words made Detmar feel sad. ‘It was the end of a friendship as far as I was concerned,’ he said. ‘It was as though he meant to say, “You’re my slave now.” And I wasn’t going to be his fucking slave. He was telling me the power was with him and not with me, but I never had any power anyway. Yet I knew Issie still loved him and she needed his clothes. She was addicted to his aesthetic.’28
The day after the Joan show Lee took a car to Metro studios in the East End for a cover shoot with Nick Knight for The Face magazine. McQueen, as art director, wanted to cast himself as the Joan of Arc/Agnès Sorel figure and recreate the look from the show, complete with bald head, a series of white plaits that draped over his head and face, red contact lenses and red eyeliner. Next to the published cover image of McQueen a caption read, ‘You’re not going out like that.’ When asked to explain the significance of the photograph, McQueen wrote, ‘Deep inside of me I have no regrets of the way I portray myself to the General Public. I will face fear head on if necessary but would run from a fight if persuaded. The fire in my soul is for the love of one man but I do not forget my women whom I adore as they burn daily from Cheshire to Gloucester.’29 McQueen told the magazine how happy he had been with the collection – ‘it had a really good attitude,’ he said – and even his bosses from Givenchy thought it had been ‘a killer’ (probably not their choice of words). He also revealed how a mysterious woman had contacted his office to inform them that she had left everything to him – ‘she thought I was the best thing that had happened to British fashion and she wanted me to have her savings,’ he said. It was not a ‘massive fortune’ but it was enough for him ‘to start up a foundation in her name for upcoming fashion designers. That’s what I’ll do with the money; I want it to be helping out some of the young talent in Britain.’ (Although McQueen put that idea on hold it was something he would eventually return to when he set up the charity Sarabande in 2007.) He also said that he slept a lot less than he used to because he had so many ideas spinning around in his head. After all, he only had two weeks before his Givenchy ready-to-wear show. ‘I’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night tonight and already I’ll be thinking about Givenchy,’ he said.30
In March 1998, McQueen presented a Givenchy collection that satisfied even his harshest critics. Brenda Polan, who had savaged his Givenchy show in October the previous year, said he had ‘toned down the gimmickry and employed his signature sharp tailoring to produce a strong, controlled collection which Hubert de Givenchy might have called his own’.31 In the front row of the show sat Kate Winslet, who was in Paris for a fitting with the designer for the dragonfly-embroidered gown that she would wear to the Oscars later that month – although she did not win best actress for Titanic, her outfit was considered ‘the coup of the night’ and later that year she would marry her first husband dressed in McQueen.32
That April, back in London, Lee and his friend Shaun Leane went out in Soho for a few drinks. McQueen was in high spirits. The latest issue of Visionaire had just been released and it contained a photograph taken by him that Lee thought was hilarious. The ‘magazine’, guest-edited by Tom Ford of Gucci, consisted of a black light box, like a ‘miniature coffin’, and a series of twenty-four slides, including one shot by McQueen of an erect penis at the moment of ejaculation. ‘I was not surprised,’ said Ford at the time, ‘and I have not spoken to him about it. This was his vision of light.’33
That night in Barcode, a gay bar in Archer Street, Lee spotted a man, like Murray, who was tall, thin and dark-haired. At the same moment, Richard Brett, who was then twenty-five, looked across the crowded bar and saw Lee, dressed in shorts and a short-sleeved checked shirt. Lee walked up to Richard and paid him a compliment about how great he thought he looked and the two started talking. ‘It was one of those magical moments where you have an instant attraction to someone and we just hit it off,’ said Richard. They talked for about an hour and a half and then the two men left separately. Over the course of the next few days, Richard kept thinking about the man he had met in Barcode, who he recognized, and finally, after being persuaded by some friends at work, rang the office and spoke to one of Lee’s assistants and left a message. McQueen rang back and they arranged to meet again. ‘I remember it was a beautiful May day and we took a cab and lay on Hampstead Heath for the afternoon,’ he said. ‘Then we went back to his house in Islington and then to a bar, the Edward, where we stayed until quite late in the evening. At the end of the night we went our separate ways.’ For Richard it was not love at first sight, more a gradual realization that he felt a deep connection to Lee. ‘He had an amazing energy about him,’ he said. ‘He was fun, he had an intense hearty laugh and I felt like this was going to be special.’
That summer Richard Brett was working at a public relations agency in west London and during the day the couple would send affectionate fax messages to one another. Often, Lee would courier over to his new boyfriend enormous bunches of flowers; Richard remembers one that must have been at least four feet high and so big he was unable to take it home and it had to sit by his desk at work. Lee liked the fact that Richard did not seem to be particularly intimidated or impressed by the world of fashion a
nd celebrity. In fact, his new boyfriend had quite a cynical attitude towards this superficially glamorous lifestyle, again something that helped them get along. ‘He knew that I saw him for who he really was, the genuine person,’ said Richard. ‘Other people on the gay scene probably wanted to be close to him for what he was rather than who he was. But I think we had a chemistry. We made each other laugh and probably, ultimately, that was what it was about.’34
With each month McQueen’s fame seemed to grow. In May 1998, American Express commissioned him to design a special limited-edition credit card and then, later that month, he was invited to attend a state banquet for the Emperor and Empress of Japan, along with a ‘full complement’ of British royals, at Buckingham Palace.35 However, at the last minute he decided not to go. ‘I just couldn’t be bothered,’ he said.36
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