Annabelle Neilson
The tragedy of a ‘secret’ socialite
If you worked in fashion in the mid-nineties, it was impossible not to know Annabelle Neilson. You might not know her, but you would certainly “know” her. How could you not? Like champagne, she was everywhere. Like champagne, she was effervescent. If champagne was the party people’s favourite drink back then, Annabelle Neilson was their favourite party girl.
Like all the best party people, Annabelle was so much more. The fashion world is full of rich, thin, beautiful girls with splendid breasts in see-through dresses: to truly capture its imagination, you have to be more than the sum of these clichéd, dime-a-dozen parts. By all accounts, Annabelle had heart and soul. She was kind. She was loyal. And while she entered the fashion scene little more than a child who needed mothering, in her later years she morphed into more of a mother figure – not least to Lee Alexander Mcqueen, one of her closest friends until his death in 2010.
“He was my brother, my boyfriend, my soulmate,” she once said. “Most of the time people called me Mrs Mcqueen. Quite often we were sharing a bed. The truth is I was happier with Lee than with anyone else. He asked me to marry him towards the end and I said no. I wish now that I had said yes.”
Her friends would surely agree that it was both her best quality and her worst that Annabelle said “yes” to most things. In 1994, she agreed to marry Nat Rothschild, son and heir of banker Jacob, and in line to become the fifth Baron Rothschild and inherit a £500million fortune. To the chagrin of each of their families, they eloped to Las Vegas, but after three tumultuous years, the couple divorced, with Annabelle reportedly receiving a generous settlement, in exchange for which she had to sign a confidentiality deal and revert to her maiden name.
As a successful model who embraced her newly single life with gusto, her warmth and enthusiasm soon placed her at the white hot centre of fashion’s most outrageous parties, where days would sometimes turn to nights and into days again. In the late Nineties and early 2000s, her set included John Galliano, Naomi Campbell, Sadie Frost, Sophie Dahl, Jeremy Healy, Meg Matthews, Juliette Larthe and Isabella Blow – not forgetting Kate Moss, to whom she remained extremely close.
“Kate is my best mate and I love her like a sister,” she once said. “Yes, she’s an icon, but to me she’s just Kate.” Introduced to each other by Mcqueen, they were both bridesmaids at his unofficial wedding to George Forsyth in 2000.
Days before her death last Thursday, reportedly either from a heart attack or stroke, she posted a picture on Instagram of herself, Moss and Poppy Delevingne attending the wedding of her ex-boyfriend, Edward Spencer Churchill.
What made Annabelle “the Gulf Stream of social butterflies”, as Tatler fondly called her, was her ability to float in and out of various disparate social scenes, equally at ease in each. Born in 1969 into a wealthy aristocratic family – her paternal grandmother was a second cousin of the late Queen Mother – she was too spirited to stay in the privileged lane that was her birthright. Sadly, money didn’t inure her from life’s slings and arrows. Like her friend Mcqueen, she was severely dyslexic. Bullied at school, she left aged 16, then during a gap-year visit to Australia, suffered a horrific assault by a man who later went on to kill three women, which left her with injuries requiring reconstructive surgery.
“I fell into a serious depression and became a heroin addict because it provided an escape bubble and was the only way I could cope,” she said in 2015. “In a way, heroin saved me, because otherwise I would have killed myself.”
It’s a statement that may sound nonsensical to anyone who has not suffered from depression, but for some people who struggle with their mental health, the allure of hard drugs as an escape can prove hard to resist. As the documentary, Mcqueen, traces in heartbreaking detail, Alexander Mcqueen’s life was blighted by a similar drug-induced cycle of elation. Annabelle Neilson was far more than Mcqueen’s muse. She was his mirror. In the wake of her death, inevitably, comparisons with the hard-partying Primrose Hill set of the Nineties will abound. But Mcqueen and his friends partied on a different level, one that was international in scope and far darker.
Aged 49, having endured the tragic deaths of her friends Mcqueen and Isabella Blow, most people, whether they knew her or not, would have described Annabelle Neilson as a survivor. Not only had she survived that horrific attack as a teenager: in 2013, she also endured a terrible riding accident and was left with a broken back and pelvis. Her recovery was charted on Ladies of London, the Bravo TV series documenting the lives of London socialites. Later, she said that she had decided to appear on the show to help promote herself as a children’s author. Her book series, known as The Me Me Me’s, was inspired by the emotions she felt as a child. One, called Imaginative Me, was dedicated to Mcqueen. In the wake of her death, and given that she was the last person to see him alive, some friends are inevitably trying to derive comfort from the idea of Annabelle and Lee being together again. He called her Tinkerbell, because with her pale skin, wide eyes and slender physique she looked ethereal. Tragically, however resilient a person may appear; no one really knows what dark nights of the soul they might endure. “The fragility of life… we can all be disregarded quite easily,” Alexander Mcqueen says in the Mcqueen film. Then he clicks his fingers. “There – you’re gone.”
‘The truth is, I was happier with Lee than with anyone else’