No one who went to an Alexander McQueen catwalk show could ever again have believed that fashion is merely superficial. McQueen’s interest was in psychology, and fashion was how he communicated. As his great friend, mentor and muse, the late Isabella Blow, once said: “It’s all about feelings, to Lee.”
McQueen based one collection on Hitchcock’s films Vertigo and The Birds; that show, in a disused school in Paris, opened with an empty catwalk and the unmistakeable click-clack of a lone woman walking in high heels, the sound growing gradually louder as the shadowed blonde grew nearer.
A show in the Conciergerie in Paris, a chill dungeon where Marie Antoinette was held before her execution, starred a model in lilac hooded coat, guarded by wolves.
In one London show, the audience was seated around a giant mirrored cube, which turned transparent so that they could see models on a padded white floor while the models could see only their reflections.
There was the show inspired by the 1970s classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, one which referenced Lord of the Flies, and another in which models moved around a giant chess board.
Hitchcock, Marie Antoinette, asylums, Lord of the Flies; this was classic McQueen territory.
Even when he became the toast of Paris, surrounded by the trappings of wealth and fame, he could never stop himself from obsessing over the dark side of beauty, like a little boy turning over a ladybird to examine the black and wriggling legs underneath.
He was a Brothers Grimm of fashion, enchanting and captivating the audience with the most incredibly beautiful clothes, only to make their stomachs lurch with the underlying menace that shot through his work.
Because every show contained outfits designed to thrill, shock – and catch the eye of picture editors – many people never realised that much of McQueen’s work was, quite simply, heart-stoppingly gorgeous: exquisite tailoring, beautifully sculpted dresses and glorious print.
To wear McQueen is to be dressed in hourglass armour. When I interviewed him a few years ago, he told me: “I grew up with three older sisters, and I saw them go through a lot of shit, I always wanted to be able to protect them.” He did this the best way he knew how. “They would call me up to their room and I’d help them pick out clothes for work. Just, you know, what skirt with what cardigan, but I was always trying to make them look strong and sheltered.”
McQueen was never one of the air-kissing fashion fraternity, preferring to socialise within a tight, protective group of friends.
His manner was often gruff and rude, even to those he liked: Isabella Blow, who was broke when she bought his entire first collection and had to pay for it in installments, told me once how he used to march her to the cashpoint every week to get £50 out.
Yet he genuinely adored Blow. In October 2007, on the occasion of his first fashion show after her death, the audience walked in to discover the room heavy with the scent of Fracas by Robert Piguet, the fragrance with which Blow used to fill every room she entered.
Smell is a sense which triggers our emotions; it was more eloquent a tribute to Blow than any of the flowery eulogies I had read.
Two years previously, in the aftermath of the Kate Moss cocaine scandal, at a time when most of the fashion world were shunning the model for fear of losing their commercial partners, McQueen took his catwalk bow in a T-shirt which read: “We love you Kate.”
In an industry full of pomp he could cut through it with tailor’s scissors, and he was, as his friend Daphne Guinness put it, “generous without noise”.
McQueen was the great genius of his generation in British fashion. He was, like all the most interesting people, a complex and contradictory character.
He loved to describe himself as an anarchist, but when he received his CBE he told his parents that he locked eyes with the Queen and that it was like falling in love.
The genius of his clothes lay in his ability to keep the joy and hope symbolised by beauty and perfection in a tantalising equilibrium with the darkness which rumbled beneath.
In real life, the tragedy is that the darkness won out.
Extracted from The Guardian.
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