One day in 2000, I was in London driving up in a cab to the Alexander McQueen show at a warehouse in some far flung corner of the city. The cab driver asked what was going on and I said, “It’s a fashion show, by a designer named Alexander McQueen.”
“He’s a cab driver’s son, ya know,” said the cabbie proudly in his Cockney accent.
I did know that. But why the cabbie knew was less clear, except that McQueen had by that time made a name for himself by putting on some of the astonishing, troubling, gripping and breathtaking fashion shows ever seen.
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What I did not know was what lay in store when I ascended the ramp.
Inside, stadium seating was set up on all four sides of a square stage enclosed in glass like a box. A harsh light played in the center. At the center was a box enclosed and veiled.
When the show began, the models came out and McQueen’s macabre vision unfolded. Strange, beautiful. Kate Moss. Winged creatures flying through the air. The voyeurism was disturbing, like a Victorian mental hospital cell — but with clothes. Suddenly the walls of the box fell, and inside was a tableau of a naked woman with a mask and a breathing tube.
It was bizarre. It was exquisite.
And it was nothing if not cinematic.
The cab driver’s son developed quite an imagination, dark, epic. It would be McQueen’s M.O. his entire career.
Alexander McQueen, first name Lee, was a student of Central Saint Martins, the tough-love London fashion school that has forged other designers such as John Galliano and Stella McCartney.
The school has chewed up and spit out many talented charges, but McQueen was its star rebel by any measure.
When he apprenticed at a tony Savile Row tailor, he famously scrawled “I am a c–t,” on the inside of the suit he was working on for Prince Charles, before sewing in its lining.
The flair for performance began early. When first beginning to show, he gained attention for refusing to face the camera when giving interviews or taking bows.
But he was not all stunts and no craft.
McQueen’s breakthrough moment came with a pair of pants miraculously feats of engineering that were cut so low on the hips they felt only like “a hand between the legs.” The “bumsters” were the beginning of bringing the waistline of pants down in the ’90s.
The young designer found a kindred spirit in Isabella Blow, a flamboyant hat-wearing influential fashion editor, who bought up his entire graduation collection.
“He had an incredibly broad frame of reference for a working class guy,” said Simon Doonan, a fellow Brit who is the creative director of Barneys.
“From his time at a Savile Row tailor to the fashion excess of Marchesa Cassatti. He was very cultivated and enjoyed being around cultivated people.”
Corporate eagles soon spied a goose who could lay golden eggs. McQueen captured the eye of fashion conglomerates looking to revive fashion labels and in 1996 he was installed at the storied French house Givenchy.
His first show there didn’t fail to disappoint: he had angels, inspired by Icarus, the one who flew too close to the sun.
McQueen struggled with commerciality in that fold but spent five years there. In 2000, he was embraced by the Gucci parent group, who gave him funding for his own label. They opened stores in New York, London and Milan, later Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and launched two perfumes Kingdom and My Queen. His clothes have been worn by countless celebrities including Drew Barrymore, Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, who accompanied him to the 2006 Costume Institute gala, and Lady Gaga, who has incoporated his suitably outrageous designs into her videos.
But over the years his shows were the main event, taking leaps and bounds in theatricality.
Memorable ones are too numerous to list. In Paris, he showed at the prison where Marie Antoinette was held, with her as the theme. Live wolves prowled the runway. Then there was the show where the models lips were held away from their gums by dangerous-looking metal mouth guards, teeth bared. They stormed a stone covered runway. It looked rather like hell. Or the one inspired by the film “They Shot Horses Don’t They?” where the models engaged in a dance marathon, dressed of course in gorgeously tailored clothes. His most recent spring collection featured impossible-looking humpbacked footwear that were nicknamed “armadillo shoes”.
“His show always involved things that were extraordinary, challenging for the models in terms of what they had to wear and do,” said Doonan. “The shows were always a high wire act. That gave them this incredible creative tension.”
McQueen famously showed once in New York. It was during a hurricane-like storm and he went with it: the theme was Islam and the models came in semi-veiled moon and star, harem-like garb, stomping through a giant black pool of water. It was a show that more fearful times today might not have allowed.
“He was an innovator,” said Mary Lou Luther, a veteran fashion journalist. “I’m shocked especially because he was so future-oriented. He had just streamed his last show live. He was the first to take advantage of social media.”
In fact McQueen had tweeted last Tuesday that his mother had died. Three words come up again and again in reference to him: Creative. Risk taker. Showman. But there’s another: “He was complex,” said Doonan.