A stitch in time
McQueen examines life and career of a brilliant, troubled designer
The London fashion world didn’t know quite what hit it when Alexander McQueen’s dishevelled models staggered down the runway at his 1995 Highland Rape show, their Scottish-inspired clothing ripped to expose breasts and nether regions.
It was exactly the reaction that McQueen, then in his 20s and subsisting on McDonald’s and unemployment cheques, was seeking. “I don’t want a show where you come out feeling like you’ve just had Sunday lunch,” he said at the time. “I want you to come out either feeling repulsed or exhilarated.”
McQueen would go on to provoke, repulse, inspire and exhilarate — often simultaneously — until he was 40, when he took his life. How did a taxi driver’s son make the unlikely journey to the top of the fashion world, and what made him end it all at the height of his powers? For filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, the two questions proved irresistible and led to them making the documentary McQueen.
Fashion is a compelling subject for documentaries — indeed, few subjects are so enticingly visual. But the challenge is always to peel away the well-polished — and wellguarded — facade.
“The fashion world is a bubble,” says Ettedgui, who wrote and co-directed the film. “They don’t necessarily take kindly to outsiders coming in and revealing their secrets.”
The filmmakers approached close to 200 sources, says Bonhôte. Finding footage was painstaking work, but they secured key parts of McQueen’s most dramatic runway shows, along with some candid interviews with the designer.
They also found some valuable archival footage — including some private footage that McQueen and his associates captured for fun, trying out a new camera as they travelled to Paris for the designer’s new, high-profile post at Givenchy in 1996, looking like grinning kids taking their parents’ car for a spin.
The filmmakers were also able to convince some key McQueen family members to speak, namely his older sister, Janet, and her son, Gary, a designer himself who worked for his uncle. And they interview some of McQueen’s former colleagues, though not all: Sarah Burton, for example, who succeeded McQueen at his namesake label, doesn’t appear.
At the heart of the film, though, is McQueen’s work — and the way his bracing talent reverberated through the fashion establishment.
The film is divided into chapters, each focusing on an particularly
influential McQueen show. The first, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims in 1992, was originally his final project at Central Saint Martins, the well-known London fashion school.
Even getting to the school was unlikely. The young Lee McQueen (he reverted to his middle name, Alexander, later because it sounded posh) was supposed to become “a mechanic or something,” but he was obsessed with drawing clothes. His mother encouraged him to knock on doors on Savile Row for an apprenticeship, and there, he became a superb craftsman.
Isabella Blow, a prominent fashion figure, bought up his entire Jack the Ripper collection and helped him make his way. But it’s clear that, as an associate says: “No one discovered Alexander McQueen. Alexander McQueen discovered himself.”
At first, there was no money. A friend describes how the two went to McDonald’s after a major show, dropped the food on the floor, but had to pick it up and eat it because they couldn’t afford to buy more.
Things changed radically when luxury conglomerate LVMH hired McQueen for Givenchy. But McQueen didn’t just sit back and enjoy his financial windfall — he poured it back into his own label. It was a time of enormous pressure; McQueen says in one interview that he produced an astounding 14 collections in a year.
For a man often called the “bad boy” or “enfant terrible” of fashion, there was much else to learn about McQueen, the filmmakers say. Among the things that surprised them: his sheer technical craftsmanship, and a constantly developing business savvy.
They were also struck by how McQueen’s personality contrasted with the myth. “He had this reputation for being abrasive, punk,” says Ettedgui. “But what we see in the archive is McQueen with friends, with his parents, even his beloved dogs, being very human and very tender at times.”
At the end of his life, two deaths devastated McQueen. Blow took her life in 2007 — we see him at her funeral, looking destroyed. And in early 2010, McQueen’s beloved mother died. Only days later — on the eve of her funeral — the designer killed himself.
The filmmakers can only speculate why McQueen, who struggled with drug addiction, took his life. “Fashion does come with a very unique set of pressures,” says Ettedgui. But, he adds, “People we spoke to said, ‘Don’t try to make him a victim, because ultimately the person who put the most pressure on McQueen was McQueen.”