Alexander McQueen takes his life
British fashion designer Alexander McQueen has died, an apparent suicide at age 40. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by his life. His mother had just died, in fact he died the day before her funeral, his Australian lover whose name he had tattooed on his arm returned to Australia and he was enduring the pressure of mounting his next collection.
Lee, as his friends called him, had a working class background and 2 weeks before his death was allegedly musing about the emptiness of fashion and the vacuousness of the rich and famous and pondering leaving fashion with a photographer. His life had changed drastically before, the cab driver’s son got a CBE from the Queen before he was 40.
He has been mourned publicly by the best dressed, loudly and dramatically so. In the words of his former “husband,” George Forsyth “The truth is, the fashion world is the loneliest place on the face of the planet. It’s a shallow world full of party people and party ‘friends.’ Lee knew that,’ ” he tells the London Daily Mail. According to Forsyth he and Lee partied and lived large with the “fabulous crowd” including Kate Moss, before becoming bored and disillusioned with it. Forsyth chides the recent press coverage of McQueen as not reflecting the life of the brave, tough, bold, talented man he knew and instead focusing on celebrity reaction, often celebrities he didn’t even know.
While a fashion student he was discovered by fashion editor Issie Blow who became a close friend and early supporter. As Mr. McQueen’s career sky rocketed he did not find a place in his empire for Ms. Blow whose career became sluggish as they grew farther apart. She too killed herself in 2007.
‘Bad boy’ of fashion broke rules
www.edmontonjournal.com | February 14, 2010
Alexander McQueen, who was found dead on Thursday at age 40 after apparently hanging himself, was celebrated as the “bad boy of British fashion” — an aggressively talented tailor who refused to compromise and was all the more lauded as a result.
His genius with clothes catapulted him out of a grim East London estate into a world of glamour and wealth. But while the “poor-boy-made-good” story was good copy, McQueen never truly shrugged off his outsider status. Instead he thrived on controversy, baiting the grandes dames of the fashion world who queued up to interview him, on one occasion leaving a powerful fashion journalist who had crossed the Atlantic for an audience “white with shock.”
McQueen was always at his best when in confrontational mode: setting new trends — such as his infamously low-slung “bumster” trousers — or daring to use textiles printed with the image of a man being executed in the electric chair. Nor was the advent of new technology a threat to him.
When the model Kate Moss featured in a drugs scandal in 2005 and was disowned by many in the industry, McQueen swam against the prevailing tide in typically swift and innovative style. Rather than snub Moss, he projected a three-dimensional hologram of her at his next Paris show.
But an eye for the grand gesture was not purely gimmickry. While McQueen was happy to spray-paint a model on the runway — as though she were a car moving along the assembly line — the roots of his talent were as far from automation as the trade could get.
Honed at Savile Row, his feel for the chalk and scissors was bolstered by an acquisitive nature that drove him to master not only the classic shape of the gentleman’s suit, but also the designs of years gone by, or “16th-century pattern cutting and stuff like that,” as he put it.
British designer thrived on controversy
Alexander McQueen (1969– 2010)
He freely admitted to having “learned nothing” at school. But by the time he was 24 he was acknowledged as a “technically brilliant” tailor. Rebellion and precocity combined in him to sometimes curious effect: as a young cutter he famously scrawled a graffito with his chalk into the lining of a jacket destined for the Prince of Wales. A decade later, in 2001, he won his third British designer of the year award. It was presented by the Prince of Wales.
Lee Alexander McQueen was born on March 17, 1969, at Stepney in the East End of London, the youngest of a taxi driver’s six children. His mother, a social science teacher and amateur genealogist, could trace her family’s roots to the Huguenots, who sought sanctuary from religious persecution in Whitechapel and Spitalfields 250 years ago.
As a child, he was interested in fashion, and when he was three drew a picture of Cinderella “with a tiny waist and a huge gown” on his sister’s bedroom wall. His father despaired of him even then, and took little interest in his son thereafter.
When the family moved across the East End to Stratford, Lee enrolled at Rokeby Comprehensive School for Boys, where he was teased and bullied and spent his time daydreaming and drawing women’s clothes.
A childhood diving accident shattered his front teeth. He had them capped when he was 16, the year he left school, but fragments of food trapped in the caps led to decay and in 1995, when he was 26, a front tooth fell out when he bit on a Big Mac, leaving a trademark gap.
Describing himself as the “pink sheep” of the family, he realized he was gay during a family holiday when he won a beauty competition staged by a holiday company.
McQueen attended a technical college and worked as a waiter in a local drinking den. But in 1986 he saw a television report about a shortage of tailoring apprentices, walked into Anderson & Sheppard in Savile Row, which made suits for Mikhail Gorbachev as well as the Prince of Wales, and was offered a job on the spot.
He then moved along Savile Row to the tailors Gieves & Hawkes before working for a time at the theatrical costumiers Angels & Berman.
He gained more experience with the Japanese designer Koji Tatsuno and as a pattern cutter with the Italian designer Romeo Gigli before, in 1992, setting up his own label after completing a postgraduate course at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, paid for with a £4,000 ($6,400 Cdn) loan from an aunt.
It is said that his big break came in 1994, when he was “discovered” by Isabella Blow, the eccentric, aristocratic former fashion editor of Vogue.
“My relationship with McQueen began in 1994,” she said, “when I went to a Saint Martin’s graduate show. I couldn’t get a seat, so I sat on the stairs and I was just watching, when I suddenly thought: I really like those clothes, they are amazing. It was his first collection. It was the tailoring and the movement which initially drew me to them.”
She decided to buy the entire collection, purchasing one item a month and paying him £100 a week: “He’d bring an outfit in a bin liner (a trash bag), I’d look at it and then he’d come to the cashpoint with me.”
They became close friends (she once wore veiled antlers, designed by McQueen, to a lunch with the managing director of Conde Nast, Nicholas Coleridge).
Isabella Blow herself committed suicide in May 2007 by consuming weed killer. McQueen dedicated his spring/summer 2008 show at Paris fashion week to her.
In 1996, the year he was first named British designer of the year, McQueen was appointed chief designer at the archly traditional Givenchy, which for years had clothed Audrey Hepburn, where he remained for five years.
Unlike John Galliano, the London plumber’s son who preceded him at Givenchy, McQueen took no interest in the French, their country, culture or language, and the appointment was regarded by some as a mistake for both parties. His collections were not always greeted with applause, and critics said that in trying to meet the Givenchy style McQueen had, for once, compromised, and failed as a result.
McQueen simply said that producing six collections a year was too much if one was to achieve real innovation. “Give me time and I’ll give you revolutionary,” he said, admitting that Givenchy was “the biggest mistake of my life.”
As his contract came to an end, however, Gucci stepped in, acquiring 51 per cent of the Alexander McQueen label, of which McQueen remained creative director.
Backed by a second major contract, McQueen had become the enfant terrible of the London fashion scene — talented, generous and shy in private, foul-mouthed and chippy in public. Fashion editors hailed him as provocative and edgy, his upstart genius defined by a dangerous nostalgie de la boue, or attraction to crudity.
McQueen’s fashion shows continued outlandish. For his spring 2003 collection, he recreated a shipwreck; in spring 2005, a human chess game; after Kate Moss’s holographic appearance at his autumn 2006 show, his autumn/ winter collection shown in Paris in March 2007 was inspired by the witches of Salem.
He was not blind to commercial opportunity, launching scents called Kingdom and My Queen, and in 2005 collaborating with Puma to create a new line of trainers. By 2007, he had boutiques in New York, London, Milan and Las Vegas, among other cities.
But McQueen did not seek to profit from celebrity connections: “I can’t get sucked into that celebrity thing because I think it’s just crass.” In April 2008, as he was opening a flagship store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, he said of the socialite Paris Hilton: “If she comes past the shop, hopefully she’ll just keep walking.”
A decade earlier he had declined to invite Victoria Beckham to his London show, saying that her presence would detract from the appearance on the catwalk of Aimee Mullins, the Paralympic athlete who as a child had had both legs amputated from the knee down; she was due to show hand-carved cherry wood prosthetics designed by McQueen.
Last autumn in Paris, as part of his spring/ summer collection for 2010, he came up with “Armadillo” and “Alien” shoes. The Alien was covered in satin, while the Armadillo boasted scaly animal skin. Both had 10-inch heels, and three of his models refused to wear them, fearing that they might break an ankle or fall over on the runway. One of the “refuseniks” was Abbey Lee Kershaw, who in 2009 had fainted after McQueen had poured her into a minute corset.
These fears did not deter the pop singer Lady Gaga, who managed to dance in a pair of gold Armadillos in the video for her new single, Bad Romance.
In 2009, McQueen ventured into designing for the stage, creating the costumes for Eonnagata, a production at Sadler’s Wells based on the life of the Chevalier d’Eon, an 18th-century French secret agent for Louis XV who spent much of his adult life dressed as a woman.
“This male-female character was so up my strasse (street),” McQueen remarked. “I’m interested in the dark psychosis of his mind. There’s a melancholy there, especially after he was exiled and became the puppet of the ladies who lunch.
He was named International Designer of the Year at the Council of Fashion Designer Awards in 2003.
He was named British Designer of the Year four times and was due to unveil his new collection at Paris Fashion Week on March 9.
In 2000 (in the absence of civil partnerships), McQueen “married” his boyfriend, George Forsyth, a documentary filmmaker, in an unofficial ceremony aboard a yacht owned by an African prince and moored at Ibiza; Kate Moss was a bridesmaid. The relationship had since ended.
McQueen’s mother, Joyce, died on Feb. 2, and her death is thought to have profoundly affected her son. He remained passionate about fashion to the end: “Clothes and jewelry should be startling, individual. When you see a woman in my clothes, you want to know more about them. To me, that is what distinguishes good designers from bad designers.”
Refreshingly, however, he never lost his sense of perspective: “At the end of the day, it’s just clothes,” he would say. “Know what I mean?”
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