Touching tribute to a true fashion original
Mcqueen 15 Cert, 111 min Dirs Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui
‘Rags to riches” could apply both to the tragic life story of Alexander Mcqueen, and, as the new documentary Mcqueen posits, to his gleaner’s aesthetic. Forever dirtying things up in his scandalous ascent to fame, he confected lavish art out of the trash can. When he sent models out on to the catwalks wearing umbrellas or hubcaps on their heads, or wrapped head-to-toe in cling film he’d just found lying around, everyone could see how “Derelicte”, the spoof collection of Will Ferrell’s Mugatu in Zoolander, was so wickedly plausible.
Filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui recount Lee Alexander Mcqueen’s speedy rise to prominence, as an East End boy who dropped out of school at 15, after spending all his time in class doodling clothes. Showing a gift for quick-fire tailoring that made him the envy of Savile Row veterans, he made himself indispensable as an apprentice, before his graduation show from Central Saint Martins was bought in its entirety by the style icon Isabella Blow: a mentor with whom he had an intense but complex relationship, and whose 2007 suicide preceded his own.
By just 27, Mcqueen had become head designer at Givenchy in Paris, a startlingly precocious appointment that carried obvious, Icarus-like risks: he quickly deemed his first collection there an overblown failure. But he had already achieved tabloid notoriety with such succès de scandale as “Highland Rape”, his 1995 runway collection, all ripped fabric and exposed breasts, inspired by the brutal quelling of Scotland’s 18th-century Jacobite rebellion. This film captures the furore and backlash attending such shows, rekindling an excitement that’s hard to come by any more. By confronting us head-on with Mcqueen’s risky fusion of themes – sex and death, cruelty and beauty – it firmly endorses his talent for pushing the vanguard.
The testimony from friends, relatives and colleagues (barring Mcqueen’s successor, a reluctant Sarah Burton) is more than sufficient, but there’s enough balance and objectivity in the film’s approach that it doesn’t feel like insider-y hagiography. Mcqueen’s obsession with Michael Nyman’s music for The Piano, which he’d play night after night while beavering away on his early designs, has paved the way for Nyman to score this whole film with excerpts from that and his other soundtracks: all those restless, circular rhythms are well-suited to this particular subject, with Mcqueen’s indefatigable career drive.
Ex-boyfriends contribute, but there are certain areas of Mcqueen’s tormented private life the film respectfully just hints at. We briefly learn, quite late on, of his childhood sexual abuse by his brother-in-law, and how the money earned in his thirties led to heavy use of drugs, especially cocaine. Living up to the image of being Alexander Mcqueen was evidently tough for Lee, once a chubby, talkative working-class lad who restyled himself uneasily as a svelte Svengali.
That said, he remained touchingly open in interviews, temperamentally unable to disappear into the monosyllabic mystique beloved of fashion royalty. Even if he disdained the stereotype of being some kind of haute-couture hooligan, he clung on in various ways to a barrow-boy’s infectious, take-me-or-leave me attitude. This kind of honesty only made the shock of his suicide, on the eve of his mother’s funeral, more painful for his near and dear.
Professionally, he seemed afraid of almost nothing, except any accusation of seeming mundane – one hard to level at a man who programmed two giant robots to spray-paint a rotating model with yellow and black dye, in his sensational 1999 show “Savage Beauty”.
For all its baroque pomp, though, Mcqueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.