Alexander McQueen
BY ALEX BILMES McQueen could be frosty and tart. But he also made me laugh. Why do gay men design women’s clothes? ‘Because we’re too scared to be plumbers’
When Lee McQueen died, in 2010, aged 40, it had been two years since I’d seen him. We were not friends (that “Lee” suggests no intimacy; it’s what he was called), but I interviewed him at length, on a number of occasions, and without knowing him well I liked and admired him very much. He was not especially articulate in conversation, he did not enjoy talking to journalists, but once the barriers were down he was warm, intelligent and thoughtful, and his exquisite clothes and the fantastic theatricals he created in which to display them spoke eloquently for him, and for themselves.
The cartoon of McQueen that emerged after his suicide was of a tortured genius with an extreme predilection for the melancholy and the macabre. Doubtless there’s truth in that, but it makes it sound like it must have been painful to be around him. It wasn’t. The McQueen I spent time with could be frosty and tart but he also laughed a lot, and he certainly made me laugh. Why, I once asked him, were so many gay men drawn to designing women’s clothes? “Because we’re too scared to be plumbers,” he said.
He had an original eye: he saw things differently. He spent a good deal of time telling me about his collection of photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin (freakish tableaux, mangled body parts). He liked Witkin, he said, because “he takes something quite grotesque and turns it into something beautiful. The more I talk about his work and the more people ask me about it, the more I go back to the Witkins in my house and look at them and think, ‘Is there something wrong with me for liking this stuff?’ Because other people do find them very disturbing. But I always come away thinking I like it for the right reasons: because it changes my mind about what is beauty and what is not.” What is beauty? That question was absolutely key to McQueen.
His shows were startling. In 2001, McQueen staged a collection behind a two-way mirror that culminated with a huge glass box shattering to reveal a naked model
surrounded by hundreds of live moths. “I find moths just as beautiful as butterflies,” he said to me, his voice soft and adenoidal. “Plus they only appear at night. There’s more beauty at night, when the lights are off, than there is in the day.” Dark, yes, eerie. But beautiful and moving.
He was the son of a taxi driver and a teacher, from Bow. It was his mother who saw an advertisement for apprentices on Savile Row and guided him towards Anderson & Sheppard, where he learned pattern cutting. “You’ve got to know the rules to break them,” he said to me. “That’s what I’m here for: to demolish the rules but keep the tradition.”
I visited him at his Clerkenwell studio, watched him fit fabric on to models, wielding his scissors while his English bull terrier, Juice, charged around the room. McQueen was an artisan and proud of it: “I don’t create art. That won’t put dinner on my plate. I create clothes for people to wear.” Propped in a corner of the room, silently, decisively and gorgeously contradicting him, were the pair of ornately carved wooden legs that he once made for the double amputee athlete, Aimee Mullins, to strut down his catwalk.
McQueen was not comfortable with fame. “I’m not good it,” he said. “I’m too private. If I’m partying then I don’t give a shit who sees me. But take the piss out of me and I’ll come up and thump you.” He didn’t care much for glamour. “Glamour? I’ve got odd socks on!” International travel was “just travel — I can’t stand it”. Fine dining was “just food.” He once complained to me of his disgust at having to travel in “space wagons” — the people carriers rented to ferry him around. This was an aesthetic consideration: they were ugly. He only wanted to go in saloon cars. He knew I found this funny; he was playing the diva to make me laugh.
He suffered setbacks (a marriage that didn’t last, an unhappy period at Givenchy) but he was proud of his success. “So many designers go bankrupt,” he said. “We never have. I want McQueen to keep growing. It’s either onwards or nothing at all.”
His horrible, sad ending should not be allowed to obscure the fact that he was the most gifted fashion designer of his generation, one of the greatest ever.