As Kate Moss danced and flickered in the film like a delicate white flame in a half-forgotten dream she became in Lee’s eyes a ghost of all the women he had loved. McQueen dedicated the show to Isabella Blow, a friend he felt was slipping out of his hands and, like the hologram itself, passing into the realms of another world.
Chapter Thirteen
‘You are the sun, I am the moon’
from Neil Diamond’s ‘Play Me’, featured in the McQueen show La Dame Bleue
On 20 March 2006, after discharging herself from a psychiatric clinic in Surrey, Isabella Blow made the first of many suicide attempts. Earlier that evening Detmar had gone to a dinner in Notting Hill, followed by a screening at the Electric Cinema, and Isabella had remained at their flat in Eaton Square. There she took an overdose of pills and was only saved by the impromptu appearance of Philip Treacy and Stefan Bartlett. The men called an ambulance, which took her to St Thomas’s Hospital where Isabella had her stomach pumped. When Detmar arrived at the hospital, the doctor told him that Isabella had been sectioned and that she was suffering from classic symptoms of bipolar disorder.
In April, Isabella ordered a taxi to take her, courtesy of an account at Condé Nast where she worked, from Harrow-on-the-Hill where she had been treated in a clinic to Cheshire where she’d grown up. ‘On the way she went to Broughton Church in Staffordshire and put flowers near her family vault where her father lay,’ said Detmar.1 After checking into a hotel she took an overdose of paracetamol and then rang Philip to tell him what she had done and also about the Condé Nast driver, a piece of information that enabled her friend to trace her and save her once more. Again Isabella had her stomach pumped, but later that month, during a stay at Hilles, she disappeared. In the middle of the night Detmar heard that she had driven her car into the back of a Tesco lorry near Stroud. ‘I always hated Tesco’s,’ she said later. To Detmar, and to anyone else who would listen, Isabella would repeat the phrase, ‘I want to die. Let me die.’2 Although Isabella was taken back to the clinic in Harrow, one day she managed to escape and took a taxi to the elevated section of the A4 in Ealing, climbed over a barrier and prepared to throw herself off the overpass. At the last minute she changed her mind, but it was too late and, wearing a Prada coat and Prada shoes, she fell and broke her ankles and feet, shredding her fingernails in the process. Later, Isabella would joke that since she could no longer wear high heels there was little point in living. After being discharged from a hospital in Ealing, Isabella was admitted to the NHS-run Gordon Hospital in Victoria. ‘The conditions were just awful, it was like being in a Dickens novel,’ said Daphne Guinness. After an insurance policy ran out, Daphne and McQueen paid for a great deal of Isabella’s treatment at the private Capio Nightingale in Marylebone. ‘But we didn’t let her find out, as she would have hated the idea of charity,’ said Daphne.3 There, psychiatrist Dr Stephen Pereira, who would later treat McQueen, put Isabella on suicide watch and started treating her with a combination of medication, therapy and ECT.
American Vogue editor Anna Wintour arrived at the hospital with a present from Fracas, Isabella’s perfume of choice, and Rupert Everett, who had returned from Milan where he had covered the menswear shows for Vanity Fair, brought whitebait from a nearby fish and chip shop. Everett asked Isabella, whom he had known since the age of fifteen, why the collections made him feel so empty inside. ‘Money,’ she replied, before likening the treadmill of fashion shows to a fast-food restaurant. ‘You think you’re watching beautiful people in wonderful clothes, but actually you’re in a sausage grinder,’ she told him. ‘You forget who you are. You might have a luxury brand name written over your tits, but is that enough? In the end I was just a hat with lips, and that’s not chic.’4
While Isabella may have begun to think of herself as worthless, McQueen could still take satisfaction in his achievements and talents. On 1 May 2006, he attended the Costume Institute Gala at the Met for the opening of AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, an exhibition that featured a number of his designs, including the Union Jack frock coat that he had designed for David Bowie. That night Lee, dressed in a kilt made from McQueen tartan, accompanied Sarah Jessica Parker, his date for the evening, who wore a reworking of a dress from Widows of Culloden which included so much tartan that, according to one observer, ‘she looked like a cross between Flora MacDonald and a presentation box of Edinburgh shortbread’.5 From there, Lee flew to San Francisco to accept an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Art University, where his old friend Simon Ungless held the position of director of graduate fashion. He treated himself to a mud bath in the Napa Valley and a trip to the Sonoma Coast to see the surfers, but he was disappointed not to be able to dive with sharks; apparently it was the wrong season and the big fish were nowhere to be seen.
Back in Britain, McQueen busied himself with the design of his collection Sarabande, which he said had been inspired by a mix of Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon, the work of Goya and the Italian heiress and muse Luisa, Marchesa Casati Stampa di Soncino, particularly the portrait of her by the ‘master of swish’, Giovanni Boldini. The show, held on 6 October 2006 at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, took its name from Handel’s music which accompanied it, a baroque piece played by a live chamber orchestra. As the show started, an enormous glass chandelier rose into the air, casting beautiful shadows onto the circular wooden catwalk below. ‘The effect was one of an eerie decaying grandeur,’ wrote one commentator.6 In the finale to the show, a number of models appeared on the stage looking like walking Arcimboldo portraits, their bodies swollen by hundreds of flowers. But, as one model walked slowly around the catwalk, fresh flowers that had been frozen and attached to her dress, started to melt and fall onto the floor, leaving a trail of beauty behind her. ‘Things rot,’ McQueen said. ‘It was all about decay. I used flowers because they die.’7
McQueen still appeared to be the party boy about town. On 11 October he was invited to the opening night of the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park and later that month he was one of the guests at a masked ball at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, to honour Nick Knight. On 8 November, together with Daphne Guinness and Annabelle Neilson, he attended Vogue’s ninetieth birthday party at the Serpentine, where it was rumoured that Kate Moss had commissioned him to create a white and black lace dress for her upcoming marriage to Pete Doherty (a project that was never realized as the couple split in the summer of 2007). Yet, despite appearances, McQueen’s mind was occupied by death and the afterlife. ‘The dark side to him was the next life,’ said Archie Reed. At night, Lee would sit in the dark with a camcorder hoping to capture glimpses of ghosts or spirits on film. He started to speak to a number of psychics over the phone, often using them to try and ‘spy’ on Archie. One clairvoyant told McQueen that Archie did not like Fairlight, and that he found it too old-fashioned. In truth he loved visiting the cottage. When Archie came home from work Lee would confront him with a list of the places where he thought he had been and the men he had been seeing behind his back. All of it was nonsense, said Archie. One day, while browsing around Portobello Market, Archie came across a little doll without a face. ‘It had its arms above its head and if you put it against the wall it looked like a child crying,’ he said. ‘I gave it to him and said, “That’s you, a boy lost, with no face.”’8
Towards the end of 2006, Lee became increasingly fascinated by the Salem witch trials, a subject he wanted to take as the theme for his next collection. His mother had traced the Deane side of the family back to Elizabeth Howe, who had been accused of witchcraft by several girls in the Massachusetts village and who had been executed by hanging in July 1692. In December, McQueen travelled to Salem to research the history of what came to be known as witch hysteria, an episode in which twenty innocent people died. Accompanying Lee on the trip were his assistant Sarah Burton, fashion writer Sarah Mower, who had been commissioned by American Vogue to do a feature about the inspiration for the collection, and his American PR friend Kerry Yo
umans. ‘He seemed almost like an academic doing research,’ said Kerry. ‘He was very serious and focused. We went to libraries around Salem, he held the trial documents and each day he would ring his mum and tell her about what he had seen.’9 After a visit to the Salem Witch Museum, Lee drove to Topsfield, where he placed a bunch of flowers on the memorial stone to Elizabeth Howe and posed for a photograph. ‘Lee was wonderful company, he was very funny and quick,’ said Alison D’Amario, former director of education at the Salem Witch Museum. ‘He certainly didn’t take himself seriously although he was serious about the fate of his ancestor and the other victims of the trials. A highlight of the day and an illustration of Lee’s spirit occurred at the Old Burying Point in Salem. When the Salem witch trials’ magistrate John Hathorne’s grave was pointed out to him, he walked over to it and stamped on it – hard – in honour of Elizabeth Howe.’10
McQueen’s show In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692 – held on 2 March 2007 in a sports stadium on the outskirts of Paris – opened with a projected image of the pale faces of three young women and the sound of a voice whispering the words, ‘I open my heart to you. I open my spirit to you. I open my body to you.’ The models paraded along the lines of a blood-red pentagram etched onto the black stage in front of a giant screen that showed a film, directed by McQueen, featuring locusts, owls, heads rotting into skulls, flames, blood and naked girls. Above the stage hung a 45-foot black inverted pyramid. The overall effect, of a fashion show conceived as a beautifully executed satanic ritual, was too much for many observers. When the editors of Vogue saw the collection they ‘thought it was too dark and they cancelled the feature [about the trip to Salem]’, said Kerry. ‘His muse led him where it would and he didn’t give a shit about American Vogue or the feature.’11 Bridget Foley of W magazine described it as a ‘study in vitriol expressed via fashion’,12 while Archie Reed believed that the show ‘was the start of him saying goodbye’.13
During the preparation for the show Lee received the news that his stylist Katy England had decided to leave McQueen because Kate Moss, recently commissioned to design a range of clothes for Topshop, had offered her a lucrative role at the high street chain. McQueen took the news badly and, for a time, felt angry at Moss for luring away one of his most trusted employees and friends. ‘Kate can come down, the bitch,’ he said to Archie, as he removed the photograph of Kate Moss from the wall in his office. ‘I went out on a limb for that girl, and she didn’t even say thank you.’14
In April 2007, Isabella invited McQueen to Hilles to stay for the weekend. She was in a delicate state, both mentally and physically, as she had recently been diagnosed with suspected ovarian cancer and would soon undergo surgery, but she wanted to make the visit particularly memorable for her old friend. In advance, she had taken the trouble to hang a photograph of McQueen in the great hall below a portrait of Detmar’s grandfather by Augustus John. She had asked the cook to prepare a special menu for him, dishes that included a beetroot sorbet, a delicate anchovy and lemon mousse, followed by poached wild sea trout with saffron mash and salsa verde. But when McQueen arrived, with a couple of female friends, he proceeded to lock himself in his room. He refused all the food that had been prepared for him and just asked the cook for some Cheddar cheese. ‘He was in bed coked out of his head,’ said Detmar. ‘And that was difficult for Issie. Everything was going wrong for her and it was sad that Alexander couldn’t see that and pull himself together just a bit. So that must have been the last straw for her, I think.’15
McQueen later gave an account of the visit in which he said he did have a three-hour talk with Isabella. ‘We were at peace with each other,’ he maintained, perhaps trying to convince himself. He told her that she looked good and, at one point in the conversation, said to her, ‘You’re not talking about death – no, are you?’ ‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘She really fucking shamboozled me, didn’t she?’ he said later. ‘She knew what she was doing . . . she had convinced me that she was fine, that she had come through the worst of it.’16
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, Isabella sent a series of increasingly desperate emails to fashion critic Suzy Menkes, who had been invited down to Hilles the same weekend as McQueen but had been unable to go. ‘Issie did sound very alone and felt disappointed that Lee had let her down and that he had not given her any support,’ she said.17
On 5 May, while at Hilles, Isabella took a drink from a bottle of paraquat, the same weedkiller that Detmar’s father had taken to commit suicide in 1977. Her sister Lavinia returned from shopping to find her vomiting in the bathroom; it was then that Issie told her that she had taken the poison. Lavinia telephoned Detmar who told her to ring for an ambulance, which then took Isabella to hospital in Gloucester. She died there two days later; she was forty-eight. McQueen heard the news from his friend Shaun Leane while the two were taking a short break in Rome.
McQueen was left devastated. He flew back to Britain feeling so depressed and hollow that he immediately started to visit mediums in an attempt to contact Isabella. Sally Morgan, Princess Diana’s former psychic, remembers McQueen coming to see her two days after Isabella’s death. ‘When she [Isabella] went it was almost like he [had] lost an arm or a leg – it was peculiar,’ said Sally. The psychic told Lee that she had made contact with Issie, and claimed that he had been astounded by some of the things that she had related to him. ‘He was very troubled by her passing and the nature of it – the fact that she took her own life with poison,’ said Morgan. ‘He got great comfort from me being able to give him validation that she was talking to me.’18 When Lee returned home and told Archie Reed of his otherworldly encounter with Isabella he was initially sceptical. ‘I didn’t want Sally Morgan to be feeding him bullshit and so I made an appointment to see her myself,’ said Archie. ‘She told me things that no one else could have known. She [Issie] was standing there next to me with bright red lipstick on – Issie always wore Chanel bright red lipstick. She said to me, “Be careful,” because I think she could foresee what was going to happen.’19
Detmar asked the milliner Philip Treacy to choose an outfit for Isabella to wear for her funeral, her last public appearance. Philip knew that Issie would want her old friend Alexander to make the decision and so he telephoned him and arranged to meet him at the Blows’ flat in Eaton Square. There, the two friends, once rivals for Isabella’s attention, selected a pale green McQueen kimono and a Treacy hat made from pheasant feathers in which she would be cremated. Lee also wanted to snip a lock of hair from Isabella’s head, which he later incorporated into a ring for himself, but Philip felt he had to ask Isabella’s sisters for permission.
On the day of the funeral, Philip and Lee, the latter dressed in his tartan, stopped off at the undertaker’s to pay their last respects. McQueen, for all his obsession with death and its imagery, said that he had never seen a real corpse before. ‘Julia [Delves Broughton, Isabella’s sister] told me that when Issie was being dressed, McQueen was just sobbing his eyes out,’ said Detmar.20 At the funeral, held on 15 May at Gloucester Cathedral, Daphne Guinness remembers seeing McQueen looking broken. He cried uncontrollably throughout the service and left as soon as it was over. ‘He kept saying, “I wish I had done more,” and I said, “Alexander – what could you have done?”’ she recalls.21
Lee told his friend BillyBoy* that he blamed himself for Isabella’s death. ‘I must say I couldn’t totally disagree with him because he was so cruel to her,’ said BillyBoy*. ‘He seemed to do things to hurt himself, like things he knew were wrong. He had total cognitive dissonance – one part of him was saying, “I am going to put the screws on that bitch, I don’t care any more, I don’t need her any more,” and another, the more human side, realized that he was a monster.’22
In Isabella’s last addition to her will, which she wrote just before her death, she made a series of bequests to her friends, including Philip Treacy and Stefan Bartlett, but McQueen’s name was notably absent from the list. Lee was surprised, as h
e had assumed that she would have left him her collection of McQueen clothes.
Isabella’s death continued to haunt Lee. He placed a photograph of him with Issie on the coffee table in his sitting room and a further two portraits of his friend taken by Steven Meisel graced the wall. It seemed only fitting that his next show, La Dame Bleue, should serve as a tribute to his dead friend. The invitation, designed by fashion illustrator Richard Gray, showed Isabella as a Boudica figure riding a chariot drawn by winged horses. ‘When we met to discuss the illustration La Dame Bleue, it was the last time I ever met Lee, so the memories of this are very poignant,’ said Richard, whose friendship with McQueen dated from the early nineties, when he had first met him in Comptons. ‘Lee knew exactly how he wanted the illustration to look and spoke with precision about everything he wanted me to include in the drawing. He wanted me to draw Isabella with magnificent wings, wearing a specific McQueen dress and Philip Treacy hat, riding a chariot driven by winged horses in the sky. He seemed solemn and slightly subdued, and really wanted this to be something created with great consideration and care. This was obviously a very personal vision, to commemorate and to celebrate someone who meant so much to him, so the meeting and discussion were incredibly moving.’23
Held on 5 October 2007, La Dame Bleue served as an elaborate visual epitaph for the woman whom McQueen thought of as a kind of second mother. She, in turn, had regarded him as something of a substitute son. ‘He’s my child. I adore him,’ Isabella had once said about him.24 As the fashion crowd took their seats at the Palais Omnisports in Paris that day they immediately felt the presence of Isabella; the organizers had filled the vast space with the scent of Fracas, Blow’s favourite perfume. ‘For Blow’s friends and colleagues the effect was as if her ghost was there with them,’ said one fashion critic.25 The show opened with the image of a giant bird in flight made from blue neon lights, its enormous wings rising and falling above the entrance to the catwalk, a symbol of Isabella’s spirit, free at last. McQueen’s clothes for this collection celebrated not only Isabella’s personality but her glorious physicality too: the models wore a series of outfits that exaggerated the hourglass shape, paying tribute to ‘the cantilevered cleavage and corsetted waist that dominated her silhouette’.26 At the end of the show, McQueen, wearing his tartan kilt and a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, walked onto the stage with Philip Treacy.
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