This catwalk appearance was an emotional experience for Lee, intensified by the sound of Neil Diamond singing ‘Play Me’. The song, which included the repeated words, ‘You are the sun, I am the moon,’ highlighted the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Alexander and Isabella: the existence of one depended on the other. To some extent, McQueen had been created by Isabella, but as he became more confident and successful and her mental state degenerated, he tried to distance himself. Now that she had gone he felt like a planet out of kilter; her death, he said, had left a ‘big void’ in his life.27 Contact with psychics gave Lee a certain level of comfort – he needed to know, to feel certain, that her spirit rested in peace, that she didn’t blame him – but he still felt uneasy. His psychiatrist, Dr Stephen Pereira, said that McQueen had started to suffer from mixed anxiety and depressive disorder from 2007. Typical symptoms are low self-esteem, disturbed sleep, tiredness and lack of energy, feeling irritable, pessimistic or worried while risk factors leading to the disorder include stress, trauma in childhood and living with a serious or chronic illness, all of which were experienced by McQueen. However, despite Pereira’s best efforts, there had been, ‘enormous difficulty in getting him to personally, physically come to appointments’ with the psychiatrist.28
After La Dame Bleue show, Lee travelled to Kerala, India, with his boyfriend Glenn Teeuw. After a week in Kerala, Glenn returned to Australia for his grandmother’s birthday and then back to London, while McQueen flew to Bhutan to meet up with Shaun Leane. There, Lee immersed himself in Buddhism and learnt the basics of the religion. ‘It was on my suggestion that he went there,’ said Janet McQueen. ‘I knew someone from years ago who went and they said it was really humbling. I thought it would help him with his depression.’29 Many of Buddhism’s central tenets – such as samsara (the continual repetitive cycle of birth and death), karma, rebirth, and dukkha (suffering or anxiety) and the path to liberation – not only enabled Lee to deal with the loss of Isabella but also ameliorated, for a time, his own dark thoughts and fears. Later, he visited the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green, sometimes carried around a set of prayer beads and bought himself a number of classic Buddhist texts. He said the trip, which he described as a pilgrimage, had been ‘transformative’.30 In November 2007, on his return, McQueen took a taxi from Heathrow airport to the Soho bar where Glenn worked, gave him a present of some Buddhist beads and told him that their relationship was over. ‘I knew that we couldn’t carry on doing the same thing over and over, this perpetual backwards and forwards,’ said Glenn. ‘So we never spoke again – he was always changing his mobile number so I couldn’t even text him – and I never saw him again. I felt a great deal had been left unresolved.’31
That Christmas, McQueen went down to Fairlight with his sister Janet and on the morning of 25 December he lit a candle for Isabella. ‘From the day she passed away she was never far from his mind,’ said Janet.32 ‘I learnt a lot from her death,’ said McQueen in the spring of 2008. ‘I learnt a lot about myself. [I learnt] that life is worth living.’33
For a time, friends said Lee seemed brighter, more optimistic. He could glimpse a future for himself – one that was positive – and he started to make plans. He was keen to move from Hackney and asked the architect Guy Morgan-Harris to help him find a new London flat or house. McQueen had known Guy, a handsome, well-spoken man who runs a boutique architectural practice with his wife, since 2006 when Lee’s PA Kate Jones had recommended him. McQueen had needed some minor refurbishment work done to his house in Cadogan Terrace and from the first day they met, in the spring of that year, McQueen felt that he trusted him. ‘He was very sharp, witty and funny,’ Guy said. ‘He always kept you on your toes. Yet beneath that irreverent spirit was also a great deal of warmth.’ Guy had found him a stunning house in Montpelier Row, Twickenham, but Lee made it perfectly clear that living so far from central London was out of the question. The architect then saw an enormous flat in Whitehall Court, on the Embankment overlooking the Thames. Lee visited the property, priced at £4.25 million, on 1 February 2008 and was impressed by the view, the large living space (it had three interconnecting reception rooms) and the location; plus his old friend Paulita Sedgwick lived in the same portered block. Although it had a balcony that ran the length of the property Lee felt that life on the fourth floor of the building would not be suitable for his three dogs. McQueen, who by the end of 2008 had started to rent a luxurious flat at 7 Green Street, Mayfair, then became interested in a commercial building on Half Moon Court, Clerkenwell. The idea was to convert it into a home for him – complete with a roof garden for the dogs – plus a small gallery space in which to showcase his work. But McQueen finally decided that the building would be too close to his office.
Lee also had visions outside the capital, too. McQueen asked Guy to come up with plans to extend and renovate his small country cottage in Fairlight. In the end no major work was undertaken because he could not endure the thought of the disruption. One day Lee took Guy up to the fields behind the house which commanded a sublime view of the bay and told the architect that he would like him to build him a space-age home on the site. ‘He wanted a concrete tunnel under the ground which led to a lift that would take you up to the house, almost a James Bond villain’s lair,’ said Guy. ‘It was going to be clad in aluminium so it looked like a spaceship that had just crashed into the hillside. However, the site was in an area of outstanding natural beauty and the likelihood of getting planning permission was something like 5 per cent. I will always remember him walking through that field, wearing his Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, looking happy and relaxed and really enthused about the project. He would have loved to have seen that materialize.’34
McQueen’s spirit of renewed hopefulness manifested itself in his February 2008 show, The Girl Who Lived in the Tree. He said that one day he had been down at his house in Fairlight when, while looking at the majestic elm tree in the garden, he had had a vision of a girl who lived in its branches. ‘She was a feral creature living in the tree,’ he said. ‘When she decided to descend to earth, she was transformed into a princess.’35 An enormous tree, swathed in fabric like a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation, stood in the middle of the stage, its hue changing from icy blue to verdant green to bounteous yellow, a chromatic transformation that was reflected on the catwalk as the colour of the clothes morphed from funereal black and deathly pale greys to virginal whites and royal reds. McQueen drew inspiration from both his time in India and Bhutan and photographs of Queen Elizabeth II as dressed by Norman Hartnell. The resulting look was a highly artificial concoction, a sweetened fairy-tale mix of the Raj and Royalty. ‘It was time to come out of the darkness and into the light,’ he said.36 On the same day of his Paris show McQueen announced that his brand had turned a profit for the first time. ‘I was never in any doubt about the success of McQueen,’ he said.37
In March 2008, Lee flew out to Los Angeles to oversee the final changes to his new store, designed by William Russell, on Melrose Avenue. McQueen had commissioned Robert Bryce Muir to create a nine-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture of a man, called Angel of the Americas, which seemed to float in a dome above the store, making it visible from both the outside and the interior of the space. ‘It’s anatomically correct,’ said McQueen, who likened his new store to a cathedral. Amy Winehouse had been booked to sing at the opening, but according to McQueen she cancelled because of ‘visa problems’.38 The truth was much more complicated. McQueen had met the singer at a party in Chelsea which he had attended with his boyfriend Archie Reed. ‘But then they had a falling out, he said something about her, and she was livid,’ said Archie. Archie persuaded Lee to send her a dress worth £15,000 as an apology, but when she received it she threw it onto a barbecue in disgust.39 ‘She also spat on one of his dresses at Selfridges which she had to pay for because she had soiled it,’ he said. ‘At first she refused then she just said, “Fine – but tell Alexander McQueen I ruined his dress.”’40
&n
bsp; From LA, Lee flew to New York, where on 17 March he celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday at the Waverly Inn with a group of friends that included Trino Verkade, Sarah Burton, Annabelle Neilson, his former boyfriend Jay Massacret (who from 2006 McQueen employed as the stylist of his menswear shows), Kerry Youmans, actress Chloë Sevigny, Steven Klein and Sue Stemp. Photographs taken by Sue show Lee looking happy and relaxed, wearing a V-neck jumper, white shirt and tie, and sporting a goatee beard. Sue had first met Lee back in 1994, but the following year she moved from London to New York. When McQueen came to Manhattan he often met up with her. ‘I loved his boundless, uncompromising enthusiasm for something he was really into or interested in,’ she said. ‘He definitely had his demons and his difficulties, but I like to remember him laughing. Lee had a hysterically infectious, naughty laugh and I miss it.’41
In April, McQueen heard that Gucci had agreed to his request for a pay rise: that year he would receive £10 million. Lee used part of that money to buy the house next door to 82 Cadogan Terrace so that his sister Janet, together with her daughter, Claire, and her five-month-old grandson, Tommy, would have a decent place to live. Janet moved into the house at the end of August and would often go round to her brother’s house for dinner. They enjoyed visiting Columbia Road flower market and once he treated her to a weekend away at a spa near Badminton. ‘Lee was really generous and so I liked to treat us to a meal when we were out together,’ said Janet. ‘I know he appreciated someone not always expecting him to pick up the tab.’42
One day, Lee was walking through Islington with Janet when he saw a giant stuffed polar bear standing on its hind legs in Get Stuffed, the specialist taxidermists on the Essex Road. He was so taken with it that he bought it and had it installed in his swish new offices on Clerkenwell Road. ‘The same day he also bought the head of a giraffe,’ said Janet. ‘I’m sure he would have checked that the animals had died from natural causes, as he hated cruelty to animals.’43
In the summer of 2008, McQueen started work on Natural Dis-Tinction, Un-Natural Selection, his collection inspired by Darwin. ‘I was also interested in the Industrial Revolution because, to me, that was when the balance shifted, man became more powerful than nature and the damage really started,’ he said. ‘The collection is about looking at the world and seeing what we’ve done to it.’44 Lee asked his nephew, Gary James McQueen, to design the invitation using a lenticular image of his face which morphed into a skull (the same uncanny image would be later used on the cover of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition catalogue Savage Beauty). ‘There may have been a subliminal message there, but Lee walked hand in hand with the macabre throughout his life,’ said Gary.45
The Paris show, held on 3 October in Le 104, a former mortuary near the Gare de l’Est, opened with the sound of animal noises. A host of stuffed animals from a Parisian taxidermist – a polar bear, an elephant, a panther, a giraffe and an armadillo – lined the catwalk. An image of a spinning earth was projected above the audience and then a parade of models walked forth covered in not so much clothes as second skins – a cape shaped like the fins of a giant manta ray, iridescent jumpsuits covered in Swarovski crystals, outfits that looked like walking Rorschach tests – giving the women the look of an alternative species, something that might have stepped from a space-age Noah’s Ark. The projected image changed into a single eyeball which stared down from the heavens and then, to add to the surreal effect, McQueen appeared on stage dressed as a rabbit, perhaps a reference to the 2001 film Donnie Darko in which a figure dressed in a rabbit suit warned of the imminent end of the world. ‘I believe that we’re in danger of killing the planet through greed,’ said McQueen. ‘Every species is fragile but animals are the underdogs while we are actually bringing about our own extinction – and theirs.’46
On 6 November, Lee heard the news that his taxi-driver brother, Michael, who was then forty-eight, had suffered a massive heart attack while at Heathrow airport in his cab. Michael had had to be taken to hospital by helicopter. ‘I had to be zapped four times,’ he said. Later, when Michael had recovered, Lee turned up at the hospital. ‘He sat on the bottom of the bed and asked, “Did you see anything? Did you see the gates?”’ recalls Michael. ‘He wanted to know whether I had seen anything on the other side, because I had died a couple of times.’ Michael laughed and told him to piss off.47
‘The other side’ became ever more alluring to McQueen. According to Archie, Lee started to research Marilyn Monroe’s suicide on the internet and read all the post-mortem reports on her death. He gave his boyfriend a number of presents, including a Gucci box filled with cashmere jumpers and a vintage Cartier watch studded with diamonds. ‘That’s to remember me by,’ Lee said. When Archie asked for details of where Lee was going, and why he was giving him keepsakes, McQueen remained silent.48
By the end of 2008, Lee and Archie Reed had decided to separate and at the beginning of the New Year McQueen felt so lonely that he turned to the internet for company. He was already an active member on the dating site Gaydar – for his profile picture he used a professional shot of him wearing combat trousers and a grey cardigan taken by Derrick Santini – and then in January he enlisted the services of escort and porn star Paul Stag. Lee asked Paul to come to his flat on Green Street, where he paid him £150 – £200 an hour for his services. ‘Drugs were involved, porn was involved, and probably somebody else in the room too, probably another escort – he was very much into groups,’ said Paul.
Paul did not recognize McQueen – he did not read the fashion press – and perhaps it was this that made Lee feel so comfortable with him. ‘He was masculine, and didn’t fit into the fashion industry at all,’ said Paul. ‘If you didn’t know him you’d think he was a successful car dealer or a scrap metal dealer.’ Over the course of the next three weeks, the couple saw each other twice or three times each week until eventually Paul asked Lee whether he would be interested in changing the nature of the relationship. From that point onwards the two men considered each other as boyfriends, but Lee accepted the fact that Paul would need to carry on his work as an escort. Paul never touched drugs and sometimes he found Lee’s habit disconcerting. ‘For him, the drugs became second nature, like someone smoking a cigarette or having a gin and tonic,’ he said.49 ‘I had heard that he was becoming more excessive,’ said Lee’s sister Jacqui McQueen. ‘Since Issie’s death, from what I gathered from the family, Lee changed and seemed to lead a fast and somewhat self-destructive existence. He had lost Issie and nothing would be the same.’50
Some friends said that Lee had started to experiment with crystal meth or ‘tina’, a highly addictive drug particularly popular with promiscuous gay men who practise ‘chem sex’. Fashion insider Matav Sinclair (a pseudonym) and Lee shared a sexual partner, a man who told Matav about the designer’s fondness for crystal meth. In turn, Matav tried the drug for a week and for a few days he felt like a new world had unfolded before his eyes. Sex, and the pursuit of increasingly intensified erotic gratification, became the most important quest in his life. Then, after the sex and drugs binge was over he was left feeling hollow and depressed. ‘Any inner goodness I had was spent and I felt so isolated and sad,’ said Matav. ‘It was the most scary thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve noticed since then that people who take “tina” have these little dark button eyes, with no reflection, almost as if their eyes have died.’51
McQueen knew by now that the world of fashion – with its relentless appetite for the new and its frenzied addiction to capturing the essence of the moment – did not make him happy. He told Sebastian Pons that, in retrospect, he should never have signed with Gucci. ‘But I cannot get out of it now,’ he said. ‘I have built my own prison.’52 He did begin to toy with the possibility of walking away from the multi-million pound lifestyle to pursue a different course. He designed the costumes for Eonnagata, a contemporary dance piece directed by Robert Lepage about the eighteenth-century diplomat, spy and transvestite Chevalier d’Eon, which had its world prem
iere at Sadler’s Wells in London in February 2009. He secured a place at the Slade School of Fine Art, flirted with the old idea of setting himself up as a photographer or heading his own design school, and even expressed a wish, to Paul Stag at least, of starting his own gay porn studio. Yet he felt powerless to pursue these latter options, fearful that if he stepped away from the brand he would harm the careers, and livelihoods, of countless employees.
Lee purged his feelings of frustration in the only way he knew how: by designing a new collection that attacked the fashion industry. McQueen said that he had been inspired by a work from his art collection – Hendrik Kerstens’s photograph of his daughter Paula wearing a plastic bag on her head (a reworking of a painting by Vermeer), which was used as the image on the invitation to his show. The Horn of Plenty, staged on 10 March 2009 at the Palais Omnisports, Paris, served as a companion piece to Voss, the show set in an asylum. The models – with their pale, clown-like faces and exaggerated lips reminiscent of Leigh Bowery – looked like they had escaped the madhouse of Voss and had been let loose in a glorious fancy dress box that had once belonged to a French couturier. The clothes referenced Dior’s New Look, Poiret, Givenchy’s little black dress, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, Cecil Beaton’s designs for My Fair Lady, photographs by Irving Penn, and even McQueen’s own previous designs. On their heads the models wore ‘hats’ designed by Philip Treacy, utilizing plastic bags, tin cans, umbrellas and hubcaps. In the middle of the stage, its floor covered by broken mirrors, stood an enormous heap of what looked like rubbish, but on closer inspection was seen to contain a series of props from McQueen’s previous collections. The statement was obvious. ‘The whole situation is such a cliché,’ the designer told Eric Wilson of the New York Times. ‘The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity.’53
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