Alexander McQueen

by Andrew Wilson

  Sarah Burton recalls the sense of purpose with which Lee worked on the collection. ‘The second look in the show used traditional houndstooth that had been lacquered,’ she said. ‘Lee cut the jacket himself. He slashed it, cut an asymmetrical kimono sleeve, and took the collar off and recut it. He laid the piece of fabric on the floor and cut it to make just the right collar shape. It was incredible.’54

  The Horn of Plenty was also a reaction to the financial crash of 2008. ‘I’m always interested in depicting the age that we live in and this collection depicts the silliness of our age,’ McQueen told the journalist Susannah Frankel. ‘I think people will look back at it and know that we were living through a recession when I designed it, and we got to this point because of rampant, indiscriminate consumption.’55 In 2008, McQueen had contacted the photographer Nick Waplington and asked him if he would document The Horn of Plenty from its inception to final presentation. ‘I want it how you do it all dirty and nasty,’ he had said.56 The designer told Waplington, whose work he had added to his art collection, that he wanted the resulting book to show his legacy. ‘Lee saw this collection as a kind of grand retrospective, a recycling of ideas from the last fifteen years of his production,’ said Nick.57

  At the very end of The Horn of Plenty, which contained samples of music from previous McQueen shows as well as Marilyn Manson’s ‘The Beautiful People’, the sound of a heart monitor going into flatline was played over the PA system, just as it had at the end of Voss and Pantheon as Lecum. Immediately after a show it was normal for Lee to feel low, but this year it seemed more difficult for him to shake off the black spectre of depression. His fortieth birthday was fast approaching, but on Friday 13 March, he had made no plans to celebrate it. After the weekend he had changed his mind and called Shoreditch House, which set aside the top floor for him for Tuesday night. Guests on the night included singer Beth Ditto, Kate Moss and Stella McCartney. By coincidence, his former boyfriend Murray Arthur had turned up at the members’ club in the East End only to find the space closed for a private party. As he was walking out he bumped into Lee, who was eating from a packet of sweets. Murray wished him happy birthday, they chatted for five minutes, and then Lee walked back inside without inviting him to the event. Later that year, Murray invited McQueen to his own fortieth birthday party, a champagne reception for fifty at the George and Dragon pub in Shoreditch. ‘I got a reply from one of his secretaries saying thank you for the invitation but Alexander McQueen won’t be attending your party,’ he recalls. ‘I was a bit hurt.’58

  In the spring of 2009, McQueen flew by private jet to Majorca for a holiday with Annabelle Neilson. The friends stayed at the house Lee had bought there, which by now had been refurbished to look like a copy of one of his London homes, complete with marble floors, glass partitions and a valuable collection of art and photography. Lee asked Sebastian Pons, who he knew to be on the island, to come and stay. Sebastian’s father was dying – he realized that he could not stay long with Lee – but he felt as though his old friend needed him. One night, after Annabelle had gone to bed, the two men had a conversation on the terrace: they talked about the past, why Sebastian had felt the need to leave the company and McQueen’s growing sense of claustrophobia and feelings of imprisonment. Lee showed Sebastian the ring that contained Isabella’s hair; it was obvious that he still felt a certain level of guilt about the way he had treated her. ‘From the way he spoke he felt that he should have tried to be more helpful,’ he said.

  Sebastian had noticed earlier in the day that McQueen had been reading a Buddhist text about death and dying, but what his friend told him next left him feeling shocked and disturbed.

  ‘I’ve already designed my last collection,’ said Lee.

  ‘What do you mean, your last collection?’ asked Sebastian. ‘You mean your next collection?’

  ‘No. My last collection. I have it in my head.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ repeated Sebastian.

  ‘In my last collection, I’m going to kill myself. I am going to end this.’

  McQueen then outlined how he planned to do it: he wanted to commit suicide during the show in full view of the audience. ‘He told me he would have a Perspex or glass box and in the middle of that another glass box,’ recalls Sebastian. ‘Then, towards the end of the show, he would come out from under the ground and shoot himself, so all his brains would drip down the glass.’

  It was almost too much for Sebastian to take in. McQueen then continued, telling his friend about how he had everything prepared. He had set up a charity, Sarabande, which he had formed back in 2007, to help people in need, including students at his old college, Central St Martins, and he had drawn up a will. ‘Another night [in Majorca], Lee asked me to see if there were any axes in the house,’ he went on. ‘He said, “Can you go into the basement to see if you can find any?” I asked why and he told me he just needed them. I went down, but there were no axes and when I told him he said that I had to go and buy some. He said that I didn’t understand, that he needed protection. That’s why, he said, he had had to fly to Majorca on a private jet so he could bring his dog Callum. There were people who were after him, he said.’

  Sebastian was so worried about the state of his friend’s mental health that he telephoned the McQueen office in London. He was told by a member of staff that the designer was fine, that there was nothing to be concerned about. ‘No, he is not fine, darling,’ he replied. ‘He is really messed up.’59

  Lee had perfected the art, often practised by potential suicides, of appearing normal to the outside world. He returned to London to work on his menswear collection, due to be presented in Milan in June, and his next womenswear show, Plato’s Atlantis. In April 2009, he met with Guy Morgan-Harris again to discuss the possibility of buying a new property, 17 Dunraven Street, a large ground and lower ground-floor flat in Mayfair valued at £2,525,000. ‘It was obvious that he seemed happy with the property, though it wasn’t immediately clear that he was more serious about this one than others we had seen before,’ said Guy.60 Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that Lee was anything but his normal, charming, funny self. Those closer to him, however, began to notice that he was behaving erratically. In the past, Joyce McQueen had become concerned about her son’s increased drug use and, after a long talk, Lee had told his mother that he would try and quit. ‘He did stop, but only for six to eight weeks,’ said Janet.61

  In the spring of 2009, Janet tried to talk to her brother about his drug use. ‘He was so erratic and perhaps I dealt with it the wrong way,’ she said. ‘When people take cocaine they can get quite nasty and there was no talking to him. I could not let him treat me like that, and obviously I retaliated, as I’ve got a bit of a temper as well.’62 In April, after the argument, Janet moved out of the neighbouring house in Cadogan Terrace and brother and sister did not speak for a few months. McQueen had also fallen out with his other sister Jacqui. ‘I was just waiting for Lee to come home,’ said Jacqui. ‘I didn’t respect all the pretentiousness and shallowness of the fashion world and the front row. In that environment everyone wants to be your friend, but there was no one actually looking out for Lee McQueen.’63

  In May 2009, feeling alone and desperate, McQueen took an overdose, a cry for help that Janet believed was precipitated by the second anniversary of Isabella’s death on 7 May. ‘I know how Lee’s mind worked and he would have been beside himself,’ she said.64 At the time, Janet knew nothing about the suicide attempt and learnt of it only later after her brother’s death; McQueen’s boyfriend, Paul Stag, was also ignorant. He did think, however, that McQueen was being placed under a ridiculous amount of pressure at work. ‘Lee was working these idiotic hours, getting up early, working all day and working deep into the evenings,’ he said.65 Tony McQueen remembers that his brother would sometimes sleep on a bed in the office. ‘They talk about all this money he had – but he never went home,’ he said. ‘As soon as he’d got one collection out he’d have to start another.’66
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  On 4 July 2009, Paul and Lee celebrated Gay Pride in London – Paul took part in one of the parades and later joined his boyfriend at Café Boheme in Soho. ‘By the time I got there he and his posse had been eating and drinking for four hours, obviously running a tab all afternoon,’ said Paul. ‘The bill came to something like £900, and I hated the way they let him pick up the bill. Lee had taken his Jeep into Soho and I had to drive it back. We went back to the flat where he made me cheese on toast.’67 On 14 July, Lee went to see Lady Gaga at the Brixton Academy, and although he was not a great fan of her music, he must have recognized that the 23-year-old singer from New York articulated similar concerns to his own: the pressures of fame, the dangers of celebrity, the pleasures of hedonistic abandon and the toxic interchange between sex and violence.

  Meanwhile, McQueen’s legal team were busy trying to finalize the details of his will. Lee had first drafted a will in 2008, and had made repeated versions of it over the course of the following year. By July 2009, the final version was ready for him to sign. ‘If Lee had not signed that will everything would have gone to my dad,’ said his sister Janet. The same month, Lee tried to kill himself again with an overdose of drugs. ‘Lee’s mind in the year before he passed away was spiralling all over the place,’ said Janet.68 As his drug use increased so did his feelings of anxiety, paranoia and depression. When he lost himself in one of his sex and drugs binges he stopped worrying about the fact that he was HIV-positive. ‘He was positive but he carried on having unprotected sex with guys on drugs,’ said Paul Stag.69 ‘He had HIV and was like, well, who cares?’ recalls BillyBoy*. ‘I was a little bamboozled when he told me that. He had no responsibility to himself towards the end. I think he hated himself, sadly.’70

  Jane Hayward, a womenswear designer for the McQ diffusion line, remembers how the employees would tense up when they smelt smoke – a sign that McQueen (the only person who dared to flout the no-smoking rules in the office) was approaching. ‘People were apprehensive because he could have these mood swings,’ she said. ‘He’d also do these dawn raids, these early morning attacks when he would come and pounce.’ Staff feared that their work would be mauled and that they would be told to rework a whole line at the last minute. ‘At the same time he was disconnecting more and more, so he would go missing in action for days. There was a period when he didn’t come in for three weeks.’71

  One of the things that kept Lee alive was the thought of what his suicide would do to his family, particularly his mother. In 2009, Joyce’s kidney problems worsened and McQueen suspected that his mother did not have much time left. He made a decision to try and keep up appearances for her sake: he put his house in Cadogan Terrace on the market for £1.7 million (which he subsequently let), went through with the purchase of the flat in Dunraven Street and gave the go-ahead to Guy Morgan-Harris to start an elaborate programme of refurbishment to turn the space into the kind of ‘world den’ of his dreams.72 He designed a wedding dress for his niece, Tony’s daughter Michelle, gave an in-depth interview to Cathy Horyn of the New York Times and carried on socializing, regularly eating at Scott’s in Mount Street which now served as ‘his local canteen’ for his nearby rented flat in Mayfair.73 On 22 September, during the celebrations to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of London Fashion Week, he went to a dinner hosted by Vogue and Net-a-Porter at Le Caprice to honour Nick Knight.

  The other driving force in Lee’s life at this time was his continuing desire to revolutionize fashion. Despite his frustrations with the system – the never-ending cycle of Autumn/Winter, Spring/Summer, menswear, accessories and so on – he still wanted to try and challenge himself. He was also conscious of his legacy and how he would be remembered – as far back as 2004 he had said, ‘I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I’m dead and gone people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.’74

  When Lee started work on his collection Plato’s Atlantis – named after the mythological island first described by the Greek philosopher in the dialogue Timaeus written around 360 BC – he told his staff, ‘I don’t want to look at any shapes, I don’t want to reference anything, a picture, a drawing. I want it all to be new.’75 Sarah Burton remembers that, one day in the design studio, he turned all the research boards around so that he and his team could only see pieces of printed fabric hanging on the wall. ‘And he was completely right, because he then created something new, without references,’ said Sarah.76 The inspiration came from the sea – he loved diving and was a great fan of James Cameron’s 1989 film The Abyss – and the murky depths of McQueen’s subconscious. In Cameron’s movie a search and rescue mission, looking for an American submarine that has disappeared in the Atlantic, discover a new species. McQueen, in Plato’s Atlantis, imagined what that new species would be like: untouchable, statuesque women, raised a foot higher by ‘freakish’ dome-shaped ‘armadillo’ shoes, a reworking of a 1968 design by the artist Allen Jones.77 Laura Craik, writing in the Evening Standard, likened them to ‘cloven hooves,’78 while another fashion editor described them as ‘crab claws’.79 The collection served as a visualization of Darwinian progression in reverse. ‘We came from water and now, with the help of stem cell technology, we must go back to survive,’ said McQueen.80

  Lee had experimented with the use of digital printing straight onto fabric in Natural Dis-Tinction, Un-Natural Selection, but in this collection he perfected the techniques. ‘Lee mastered how to weave, engineer and print any digital image onto a garment so that all the pattern pieces matched up with the design on every seam,’ said Sarah Burton. In total, there were thirty-six different prints, which were ‘circle-engineered’ to the body. ‘By circle-engineered, I mean that the prints were based on a circle shape that sat in the middle of a bolt of fabric,’ said Sarah.81

  Two robotic cameras on tracks filmed Plato’s Atlantis and transmitted the event both onto a large screen – so that the audience caught glimpses of themselves – and live to the internet via Nick Knight’s website SHOWstudio. Half an hour before, Lady Gaga tweeted that her new single would make its debut during the show: the website recorded 30,000 hits in one second, causing it to crash. The title and lyrics of the song ‘Bad Romance’ – about an addiction to toxic relationships – resonated with McQueen. In the video for the single, Gaga, playing a woman sold to the Russian mafia, wore a number of outfits from Plato’s Atlantis, including the armadillo shoes. In the last year of Lee’s life she became something of a McQueen muse. In May 2011, she told Harper’s Bazaar that she felt as though McQueen wrote her song ‘Born This Way’ – a paean to sexual diversity and difference – by channelling it through her. ‘I think he’s up in heaven with fashion strings in his hands, marionetting away, planning this whole thing,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even write the fucking song. He did!’82

  That October, around the time of his last Paris show, Lee felt the need to get back in touch with his sister, Janet. He said that he was sorry for the things that he had said. Janet told him not to be so silly, she was just pleased that he had phoned her. He asked her whether she would like to come down to stay with him in the cottage that Christmas, but unfortunately she had already booked a holiday. She also knew that her brother had a reputation for changing his mind at the last minute. ‘A couple of years before I had arranged a summer holiday with him and he ended up not coming,’ she said. ‘He was very much like that – if he was on a downer or if he didn’t feel up to it he wouldn’t want to socialize.’83

  Paul Stag noticed that by the autumn of 2009 Lee had started to retreat from life a little. Paul wanted to do more things with him away from the pleasure hub of the bedroom, but Lee seemed uninterested. ‘I do remember that he said that he was going to come out to the press about his HIV status,’ said Paul. ‘I thought that it was nobody else’s business, but he felt he had to.’ Paul had been involved in an auction to raise funds for the Terrence Higgins Trust and, in November, Lee had promised to donate one of h
is dresses worth £10,000. ‘It was five in the morning and we were in bed with another guy, and both he and Lee were taking drugs,’ said Paul. ‘Lee said, “I want you to fuck him,” but I had already come a couple of times. I told him I didn’t want to do it – I was not on the clock here. He said, “If you want that dress for the auction you fuck that guy now.” To me that was it and I just walked out.’84 The couple never saw each other again.

  By the end of the year, McQueen felt isolated and vulnerable. In December, he agreed to meet Max Newsom and Nicola Brighton, who were in the process of writing a screenplay about Isabella Blow. McQueen spent the best part of the two-and-a-half-hour meeting sobbing his heart out, an encounter that left the film-makers feeling shaken and disturbed.85 Still, Lee kept a great deal of his grief to himself and there were many friends who only saw the façade and never suspected the depths of his depression. ‘He was very together, in great form,’ said the photographer Steven Klein, who had lunch with him in London over the Christmas period. ‘We made plans to do several new projects together.’86

  For New Year, Lee went to Val d’Isère, skiing with Annabelle Neilson and Jay Massacret; the friends stayed in a luxury chalet favoured by Bono that had a spectacular view of the Olympic run. ‘Too much pine for me,’ said McQueen of the chalet. ‘You don’t want to live in a sauna, do you?’ In January, Lee travelled to Milan for his menswear show, which he said had been inspired by Sting, who he described as ‘my ideal man, because he’s a real man’.87