Documenting the daring designer
A new documentary sheds light on the late designer’s intense working domain. Bethan Holt reports
There have been many attempts to tell Lee Alexander Mcqueen’s story, but few have provided such an incisive portrayal as a new documentary released this week, entitled simply Mcqueen. It’s an emotional telling of his remarkable journey from East End working class boy to one of the world’s most celebrated – and controversial – designers, until his suicide in 2010.
His story is recounted by the friends, family and collaborators in whom he inspired such fierce loyalty. The film features Mcqueen’s sister, Janet, who sheds tears as she remembers the triumphs and torment of her little brother. Sebastian Pons, his former assistant, gave directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui permission to use home videos of Lee (as he was known). He’s seen talking about everything from his show concepts to how, in the early days, he had to avoid showing his face on camera so he wouldn’t be spotted by benefits inspectors; and how, after receiving a standing ovation at his London Fashion Week show, he still couldn’t afford dinner at Mcdonald’s.
“I did it for the sake of art” is a phrase you might expect to be delivered in the lofty tones of an overly sincere creative but here however, it comes amid a hearty chuckle and knowing wink from Michelle Olley as she remembers starring in the designer’s spring/summer 2001 show finale.
Olley has a cameo role in the tale, but she relives her moment in the Mcqueen spotlight with such vibrancy that her contribution is one of the most memorable. She had agreed, at once thrilled and terrified, to take part in Mcqueen’s vision to recreate photographer Joel-peter Witkin’s 1983 Sanitarium, in which a masked, voluptuous woman is shown hooked to a tangle of tubes. The provocative tableau was to be the climax of his fashion show entitled Voss, set in a mirrored and padded box built in a London warehouse to emulate a psychiatric hospital.
The voluptuous Olley, in her early 30s at the time and working at a fetish magazine, was friends with some of Mcqueen’s close-knit team. They scouted her as the ideal woman with which to enact his idea.
“Lee pulled out this book of Joel’s images and said, ‘You will be covered in moths so you won’t be naked. The box will break and it will be about beauty and death’,” Olley remembers of a secret meeting a week before the show in September 2000.
“Did I represent freedom or oppression, death or rebirth, or just dusty, ample flesh?” she wrote in a diary she kept at the time. “My body’s going to be so at odds with the fashion sparrows and bony old crow-people in the audience… I am what most of them fear most – fat.”
Images from the Voss collection are arresting yet beautiful; models’ heads were tightly bandaged, Erin O’connor closed the show in a dress with a blood-red shell bodice and wildly plumed skirt.
Mcqueen made the audience wait for an hour for the show to begin, forcing them to look at their own image in the set’s mirrors (there were no distracting phone screens then).
Olley lay on a chaise longue enclosed in her box with a whisper of moths beneath her (blasts of cold air kept them calm), glued into her mask for three hours before the box flipped open to reveal her.
She remembers Mcqueen as mischievous rather than overly worried about a sombre message. “In the days before, there was an argument about whether I’d be completely naked or not. He said I could wear a thong if I wanted but I didn’t really see the point. He laughed his head off at that. He enjoyed the shock value; he wasn’t focusing on it as some kind of dark, death metaphor as he was creating it.
“You can’t deal with sex and death in the way Mcqueen did without a certain level of cruelty. There is so much misogyny in fashion – if you’re going to point a misogynistic finger, where do you start?” says Olley, when asked if she ever felt those undertones in the role she was taking on. “He wanted clothes that made people feel stronger and made them into warriors… Even though I wasn’t wearing one of his fierce jackets covered in metal studs, it’s empowering to know I did a thing like that. It means I have shown mettle.”