Isabella Blow viewed her friend Lee as something of a modern-day knight, a designer who had the ability to fashion clothes that served as sartorial forcefields, suits and dresses and jackets that shielded people from the brutalities of the world. Her fantasy vision of McQueen had become a reality of sorts during a shoot, ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, which she had styled for the August 1998 issue of The Face. Blow had dressed Lee in a suit of armour from the film Excalibur and had sent him into battle with a dirty and bloodied face, an imaginative reenactment that had been documented by the photographer Sean Ellis. Ellis had also been on hand to capture Isabella’s birthday party in November 1998; images of her and McQueen playing with a giant vibrating dildo which he later included in his book 365: A Year in Fashion. ‘Issie had the most filthy tongue, a vulgar fishwife sense of humour, which made Alexander chortle, but which she kept away from me because I said I’m not interested in cocks and cunts,’ said Detmar. ‘Yet sometimes she made even McQueen blush.’33
McQueen’s quest to seek out fragile but strong women and clothe them in armour of his own making continued. ‘If you look at all their personalities, the world they live in, they are all out on a limb,’ he said of the women who inspired him. ‘They’re not refined women like the women in a John Singer Sargent. They’re like punks in their own world, individuals who don’t fit in a mould.’34
McQueen’s muses often seemed fantastical, women who could have stepped from the pages of a fin-de-siècle novel, a Tennyson poem or a dark fairy-tale. His latest, Daphne Guinness, a striking-looking woman with a ‘badger’ streak of black in her peroxide hair, was described by one commentator as having the look of ‘a slightly deranged fairy invented by C. S. Lewis’.35 Her background was illustrious: she was the daughter of brewery and banking heir Jonathan Guinness and Suzanne Lisney, an artist and friend of Salvador Dalí and Man Ray; her paternal grandmother was Diana Mitford Mosley. Born in 1967, Daphne grew up in a world of aristocratic privilege and bohemian fantasy. The family moved between homes in Ireland, Warwickshire, Kensington Square and Cadaqués, Spain, where they owned a converted monastery. ‘I always wanted a piece of armour,’ she said. ‘When I was a child there were always suits of armour in our houses, and I wanted to be Joan of Arc.’36 From a young age she escaped into a self-created world of the imagination, constructing fantasies with each blink of an eye. ‘It was like a Spanish Wuthering Heights,’ she said of her time growing up in Cadaqués. ‘I would sort of wander around the hills, and I had all my little caves and things that I knew.’37 While at the family’s estate in Warwickshire, she became aware that the coal pits in the county had closed and when she saw the rivers and streams running with red water she assumed that the earth was bleeding; in reality, the colour was due to the iron oxide in the water. Then, when she was five, she suffered a traumatic attack when a family friend, Anthony Baekeland, came looking for his mother, Barbara, the ex-wife of the Bakelite heir Leo Baekeland. ‘When I first saw him, I thought he’d come to tell me a story,’ said Daphne. ‘And then suddenly, out came the knife.’ Anthony proceeded to drag her around the house, informing her that his mission in life was to kill all women, and that she would be his first victim. Although he did let her go, subsequently in November 1972, Baekeland went on to stab his mother to death and, after being released from prison in July 1980, he attacked his 87-year-old grandmother, too. ‘I remember the taste of blood in my mouth,’ said Daphne. ‘It was like being in a trance, and trying to reason with someone who is quite obviously not in their right mind was confusing.’38
At nineteen, Daphne married the Greek shipping heir Spyros Niarchos and had three children with him. The couple divorced in 1999 and Daphne returned to live in London. ‘She had been in this jewelled Fabergé cage, which turned into a pressure cooker, and then she came out of it like Venus on the half shell,’ said her friend Robin Hurlstone.39 Daphne had known Isabella Blow for most of her life – the latter’s grandmother Lady Vera Delves Broughton had been the mistress of Daphne’s great-grandfather Lord Moyne. In 1997, the two women met again at Claridge’s at the ninetieth birthday party of Daphne’s relative Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. ‘It was white tie and tiara, and of course I didn’t have a tiara, so I made one out of feathers and lots of black chiffon,’ she said. ‘Issie thought it was absolutely fantastic.’40
Isabella had tried to persuade Daphne to get in touch with McQueen, but she had resisted; she was both shy and reluctant to be introduced to the designer with a feeling of expectation hanging in the air. She had bought a great deal of his clothes from Givenchy and she was, she said, perfectly happy to know him solely through his work. ‘I also didn’t want Isabella to think that I was another Annabelle [Neilson],’ she said.
One day, as Daphne was crossing Leicester Square, she heard a voice behind her call out, ‘Oi – that’s my coat you’re wearing!’ She turned around and saw the designer. ‘You’re Alexander,’ she said, taking her lead from Isabella and calling him by his middle name. ‘Yeah, and you’re the one who’s always snubbing me,’ he replied. ‘Why don’t you want to meet me?’ The pair started laughing and took themselves off to the nearest pub where they got ‘plastered’. Daphne’s first impressions of McQueen were of a man with bright blue eyes, who was kind, honest, and who had a good sense of humour. ‘And he was really clever, it was just oozing out of him,’ she said. With a reported divorce settlement of £20 million, together with her own money, Daphne had built up an enormous collection of haute couture and often she would lend McQueen items of clothing to examine more closely. ‘And he would send them back without linings because he wanted to take them apart and see how the seamstresses had worked,’ she said. The new friends shared a rebellious spirit – they talked about how they were naughty in class and how they had felt out of place as children. ‘If you look at me and my name you would think we were poles apart, but we were both sensitive and there was a lot of commiserating between us,’ she said. ‘He was kind of like a father figure to me, always trying to cheer me up because he thought I was making bad choices with men. He was extremely protective of me and furious when people were horrid to me. He was always the one talking me out of a tree. He was drawn to people who were wounded.’
Daphne soon became concerned that her new friend was mixing with people who facilitated and encouraged his drug use. ‘Isabella was violently anti drugs, she thought they were very bad and very much disapproved of Alexander’s drug taking,’ she said. ‘She thought they were for losers. If I could say one thing to Alexander now it would probably be a conversation about drugs and self-preservation.’41
On 24 May 2000, McQueen and Annabelle Neilson attended a pool party at the Monte-Carlo Beach Hotel organized by Italian Vogue to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Helmut Newton. Guests at Lee’s table included Naomi Campbell, Stella McCartney, Meg Mathews and John Galliano. ‘Theirs was by far the buzziest table at the party,’ said one source quoted in a newspaper. ‘They were loudly enjoying themselves and plainly up for some mischief. Galliano remarked how surreal the party was and decided to add to the theatrical atmosphere.’42 He and McQueen jumped into the pool, fully clothed, closely followed by Meg and Annabelle. When Meg climbed out of the water it was said that someone ripped her skirt from her waist, ‘leaving her to saunter off in a black thong’, while Annabelle’s sheer dress, which looked like a spider’s web, became completely transparent. It was reported that the organizers of the party demanded full control of the photographs that were released to the press. ‘Those you didn’t see would have beggared belief,’ said one witness.43
Despite all the debauchery there was a part of McQueen’s mind that remained sharp and intensely focused. That night he had spotted in the crowd a man who he thought might have the power to change his life: Domenico De Sole, the CEO of the Gucci group and the suave rival to Bernard Arnault, McQueen’s boss at LVMH. In April, McQueen had approached Marianne Tesler, the president of Givenchy, with the idea of selling them a stake in his own label
. Apparently, neither Tesler nor Arnault was particularly enthusiastic about the idea – ‘They said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And nothing happened’ – and so McQueen felt as though he would have to take his business elsewhere.44 His interest was piqued when he heard that the Gucci group were going on a shopping spree – ‘There are good opportunities. There are companies out there that can be bought. But I do have a limit. I have $2.5 billion,’ De Sole had told Time magazine earlier in May.45
That night in Monte Carlo, McQueen walked up to De Sole, introduced himself and arranged to have his photograph taken with him, joking that he was tempted to send it to Arnault. ‘I thought to myself that this is my kind of guy,’ said De Sole, who suggested that they meet up in London.46 Lee knew that he was playing a dangerous game – in 1999, Arnault had launched a takeover bid of Gucci as he stealthily acquired more than 20 per cent of the company’s outstanding shares and then offered £5.9 billion for the group. In order to defend itself from this form of attack, Gucci brought in ‘white knight’ François Pinault, whose company Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR) acquired a 42 per cent stake in the group for £2 billion. So if Lee knew he was playing with fire, why do it? ‘It was like having a boyfriend that you know you have to break up with,’ McQueen said of his partnership with Givenchy, ‘the only difference with this relationship was that I didn’t feel bad about doing it.’47
By the spring of 2000, the relationship between Lee and Jay Massacret had run its course. ‘We just both went our separate ways,’ said Jay. ‘I was very young and he was the person he was. We didn’t talk for a little bit and then we became friends again, and remained friends until he died.’48 Around this time, in a north London bar, McQueen met another man with whom he fell in love – 23-year-old film-maker George Forsyth. ‘Lee was a romantic, he was falling in love all the time,’ said his friend Miguel Adrover.49
George was the son of architect Alan Forsyth and his wife, Sandra. ‘I had no concept or interest in fashion really,’ said George. ‘We just got on really well from the very beginning. He was an East End boy, I’m a north London Jew. We could talk for hours. We courted for four weeks then, about five weeks after we met, we went out one Saturday night and I just didn’t go home, ever.’50 George had ambitions to become an installation artist using video: one of his works involved filming men urinating and masturbating at a urinal. ‘George was lovely,’ said his friend Donald Urquhart, who knew him from before the time he started seeing Lee. ‘He was very inquisitive, always wanted to know more about culture. He had a good sense of humour and loved to have a laugh and was quite naughty.’51 Donald noticed how Lee’s dress sense began to change as his new, younger boyfriend started to style him in his own image: a look centring on opulent casual wear, half bling, half ‘chav’. ‘George was obsessed with trainers – he had dozens of pairs, usually very rare designer editions in a flashy style, often with thick, built-up soles to give him extra height,’ said Donald. The two young men stood out in Islington. ‘The Islington council estate look was then, as it is today, pale grey hoodie tops and trackie bottoms with a horizontal striped polo shirt from Gap,’ said Donald. ‘George and Lee were working the odd gold lamé trim, and over-exaggerated logos in fluorescent colours. Ibiza chic.’52
George first realized his new boyfriend’s level of celebrity and fame when he attended a Vogue party. As he and Lee, dressed in ripped jeans and trainers, walked down the Strand he recalled seeing flashes from a bank of photographers’ cameras and the cries of ‘Alexander! Alexander!’ ‘There was all the best drink, beautiful people,’ he said. ‘I remember him bringing over Naomi Campbell and Isabella Blow and Kate Moss and wanting to introduce me to them. That’s when it really hit me how well-known he was. Until then I’d only met Lee, but there he was Alexander McQueen.’53
On the surface it looked as though McQueen’s world was one of hedonistic abandon. There were, according to George, parties every night; champagne receptions; an endless parade of ice sculptures; cocaine passed around on silver salvers; three-day-long drink and drug binges. Yet McQueen continued to work at a furious pace. In the spring of 2000, Lee announced that he would be soon launching McQueens, a denim collection, and a line of sunglasses. ‘What I want to do is make fashion fun again,’ he said. ‘At the moment, the beast is definitely stale.’54 He was also busy preparing a giant artwork, Angel, for the exhibition La Beauté en Avignon. McQueen had collaborated with Nick Knight to create the image of an angel’s face from tens of thousands of different-coloured maggots. The work, staged in a medieval church in the ancient town in south-eastern France, was designed to be viewed from above and experienced while listening to a soundtrack recorded by Björk. ‘I’m not being big-headed, but I think what we’ve done for Avignon clears the fucking board with Tracey Emin,’ said McQueen at the time. ‘Turning maggots, the ugliest thing on earth, into a Madonna is better than listing the names of the blokes that I’ve fucked in my life.’55
McQueen expected his employees to work at the same frenetic pace, and if they did not meet his exacting standards they would be insulted and humiliated. After five years with Lee, Sebastian Pons was feeling like he needed a change of scene. Working with McQueen had been a highly stimulating – but exhausting – experience. He also felt as though Lee sometimes took advantage of his goodwill, expecting him to walk his dogs and feed his fish when he was away from London. He also felt as though McQueen was not paying him enough for the hours that he put in and, because he did not have a company credit card, he would have to pay for his own travel to Paris and Italy and then claim the money back. ‘I told him, “Lee, my numbers don’t match,”’ said Sebastian. If the two friends went out, Lee always wanted to take a taxi, and one day after climbing out of the cab McQueen snapped at Sebastian because he had been left to pay the fare. Sebastian told him that if it had been up to him he would never have taken a cab in the first place, preferring to travel by bus or tube. ‘He lost touch with how much things cost,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have a bank account with endless money like him.’ The situation reached crisis point when McQueen suggested that they go shopping and the pair took a cab to Comme des Garçons. Lee spent £9,000 in just a few minutes on some clothes and a cashmere blanket that cost £3,000. ‘Later, I went round to his house to walk the dogs and I saw that he had given the blanket to his dogs to sleep on, and they had bitten it. I thought then this was too much.’56
When Lee’s friend Miguel Adrover offered Sebastian a better-paid job working for him in New York, Sebastian took it, a decision that resulted in the breakdown of two friendships. ‘Lee thought that I had betrayed him, which was not true,’ said Miguel. Adrover and McQueen never spoke again.57 Lee told Sebastian that if he left the company he would never be allowed back; when he did leave his place was taken by Sarah Burton.
In August, a month after presenting his Givenchy show at the Grande Arche de la Défense, which was designed to look like a recreation of a downtown New York loft party, McQueen was getting ready for his ‘wedding’ to George Forsyth in Ibiza. The idea was born one night that summer when the couple had drinks in the Groucho Club with Kate Moss and Annabelle Neilson. Halfway through the evening one of the women asked George whether he would ever marry Lee. ‘Yeah, I would,’ he said. ‘Would you?’ asked McQueen, after which George again replied, ‘Yeah.’ This was before civil partnerships or gay marriage became law in Britain so they were talking about a ceremony rather than anything legally binding. The girls became immediately excited and, in a few minutes, had arranged everything: Annabelle wanted to be Lee’s bridesmaid and Kate would be George’s.
The foursome took a flight to Ibiza, where they rented a luxury villa. On the day of the ceremony, George and Lee were relaxing in the pool when the women told them to quickly get ready for their big day. At the door there were two Bentleys, one for Lee and Annabelle, the other for George and Kate. The cars whisked them down to the harbour where they boarded a three-storey motor yacht full of Lee’s celebrity friends such as Sadie Frost and Ju
de Law, Patsy Kensit, Meg Mathews and Nellee Hooper. Annabelle had commissioned Shaun Leane to make two rings for the couple, each engraved with the words ‘George & Lee’ and set with diamonds. A new-age priest performed the ceremony under a full moon, after which the guests ate lobster and drank their way through £20,000 of champagne. ‘There were no family,’ said George later. ‘It was all party people. I was nervous. I was sitting down at one point and Jude Law came up to me and said, “You don’t know anyone here, do you?” And I didn’t. But afterwards Lee and I went down to the front, under the moonlight. It was a perfect night. It was romantic.’58
The romance, however, did not last long. ‘Lee smashed him over the head with a bottle of vodka six hours later,’ said Archie Reed, Lee’s long-term, on-and-off boyfriend. ‘The whole thing was a piss-take. It wasn’t anything real, and anyone who said anything different would be lying. Lee only ever used George to wind me up – he was a nobody as far as he was concerned, just a pastime. Lee liked a bad boy and George wasn’t that, even though he pretended to be.’59 The days spent in Ibiza following the wedding were apparently so debauched that Lee told friends he never wanted to see the Balearic party island ever again.
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