Alexander McQueen

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander McQueen drew a dress on the wall of his East London family home when he was three years old. That crayon scrawl in Stratford is where the story of one of fashion's most unsettling and brilliant minds begins. Lee Alexander McQueen was born on the 17th of March 1969, the youngest of six children, the son of a taxi driver and a social science teacher. He would go on to win four British Designer of the Year awards, dress David Bowie and Björk, dress Kate Moss inside a life-size holographic illusion, and stage shows so dramatic that one critic called him "fashion's closest thing to a rock star".

  But the path from that Stratford council flat to the runways of Paris was anything but straightforward. McQueen left school at 16 with one O-level in art. He sewed obscenities into the linings of suits. He hid his face from photographers to protect his unemployment benefits. He told the founder of Givenchy he was "irrelevant" on his very first day. By the time he died on the 11th of February 2010, aged 40, he had designed 36 collections, opened boutiques on multiple continents, and permanently altered what a fashion show could be. What drove him, and what he left behind, is the subject of this documentary.

• 2. Savile Row to Saint Martins

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  McQueen left Rokeby School in 1985 with only one qualification and enrolled immediately in a tailoring course at Newham College. What followed was a two-year apprenticeship at Anderson & Sheppard on Savile Row, where he learned coat-making from the ground up. He later moved to Gieves & Hawkes as a pattern cutter, then briefly to the theatrical costumiers Angels and Bermans, where he made costumes for productions including Les Misérables.

  By 1989, at the age of 20, he was hired by Mayfair-based designer Koji Tatsuno, starting as a pattern cutter before moving into clothing production. A stint at Red or Dead followed, where he worked under John McKitterick and gained experience with fetishwear. When McKitterick launched his own label in early 1990, he took McQueen with him. It was McKitterick who then pointed McQueen toward Italy, recommending he seek an apprenticeship in Milan. McQueen secured a position with Romeo Gigli purely on the strength of his portfolio and his Savile Row credentials, then resigned from Gigli in July 1990 and was back in London by August.

  McKitterick next steered him toward Bobby Hillson, the head of the MA fashion course at Central Saint Martins. McQueen arrived unannounced with a pile of sample clothes, hoping to teach pattern cutting. Hillson told him he was too young for that. But she looked at his portfolio, and despite his lack of formal qualifications, she accepted him into the 18-month masters-level fashion design course. McQueen couldn't cover the tuition fee, so he borrowed £4,000 from his aunt Renee. He started at Central Saint Martins in October 1990.

• 3. Isabella Blow and the Early Collections

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  In March 1992, McQueen presented his graduation collection at London Fashion Week. He titled it Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims. Magazine editor Isabella Blow bought the entire collection. That transaction was the beginning of a relationship that shaped the first decade of McQueen's career. Blow became his mentor, his promoter, and his friend. She used her industry connections to advance his career, introduced him to collaborators, and championed his creative vision at a time when he had almost no other support.

  McQueen launched his own label in 1992, using his middle name Alexander rather than Lee, partly at Blow's suggestion that Alexander was "more regal", and partly, according to some accounts, to protect the unemployment benefits he was claiming under his legal name. For a period, he lived in the cellar of Blow's Belgravia house while it was under renovation. His first post-graduation collection, Taxi Driver for Autumn/Winter 1993, was inspired by Martin Scorsese's 1976 film. It introduced the bumster, an extreme low-rise trouser McQueen would return to repeatedly. He also began sewing locks of his own hair in perspex onto the clothes as his label. The entire collection was then lost when McQueen left it in bin bags behind a club after the show.

  His second professional runway show was Nihilism in Spring/Summer 1994, held at the Bluebird Garage in Chelsea. Models were styled to look bruised and bloodied, wearing see-through garments and extremely low-cut bumsters. Marion Hume of The Independent described it as a "theatre of cruelty" and "a horror show". Shortly after, McQueen met Katy England, who became his creative director and what he called his "right hand woman". The fifth collection, The Birds, held at Kings Cross and named after the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock film, featured a corsetier named Mr Pearl wearing an 18-inch waist corset. Madonna wore a pair of McQueen's bumster trousers in an MTV advert in 1994, and McQueen is broadly credited with sparking a global trend for low-rise pants as a result.

• 4. Highland Rape and the Charge of Misogyny

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  Highland Rape, McQueen's sixth collection for Autumn/Winter 1995, was the show that properly made his name, though not without a storm of controversy. The collection was inspired by the Highland Clearances, the forced evictions of Scottish communities in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Showpieces were slashed, torn, or spattered with bleach and fake blood. Reviewers saw the images of women in ravaged clothing as glamorising rape, and criticised what they called misogyny.

  McQueen rejected that reading entirely. He said the collection referred to "England's rape of Scotland", and that his aim was to counter other designers who romanticised Scottish culture. On the question of misogyny, he argued that he was trying to empower the women he dressed and to make people afraid of them. His use of clothing as a protective barrier has since been linked by commentators to his own experience of witnessing violence against women in his family.

  The charge of misogyny followed him across his career. In Bellmer La Poupée for Spring/Summer 1997, he placed model Debra Shaw in metal restraints that observers interpreted as a reference to slavery. The silver mouthpiece in Eshu for Autumn/Winter 2000 forced its wearer to bare her teeth. The sex-doll lips make-up in The Horn of Plenty for Autumn/Winter 2009-10 drew fresh criticism. A fashion writer at the Daily Mail called him "the designer who hates women".

  McQueen won his first British Designer of the Year award in 1996, the same year these arguments were loudest. The Dante collection that autumn was shown twice: first at Christ Church in Spitalfields, London, then in a disused synagogue in New York, both times to large enthusiastic crowds.

• 5. Givenchy, Humiliation, and Triumph

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  In 1996, McQueen was appointed head designer of Givenchy, succeeding John Galliano, who had moved to Dior. Hubert de Givenchy, who had built the label on elegant couture, called the appointment "a total disaster". McQueen responded by calling Givenchy himself "irrelevant". His debut show for the house, Spring/Summer 1997, featured gold and white designs drawing on Greek mythology. Some critics considered it a failure. McQueen himself told Vogue in October 1997 that the collection was "crap".

  Four weeks after that debacle, McQueen staged his own show, It's a Jungle Out There, at London's Borough Market. He said the title came from watching a nature documentary about lions hunting gazelles: "That's me! Someone's chasing me all the time, and, if I'm caught, they'll pull me down. Fashion is a jungle full of nasty, bitchy hyenas." Models wore eye make-up to resemble gazelles and clothes with horns. Amy Spindler of The New York Times, who had criticised his Givenchy debut, now wrote that McQueen was "fashion's closest thing to a rock star. He isn't just part of the London scene; he is the scene."

  McQueen's relationship with Givenchy was never comfortable. He told the house it was starting to "constrain" his creativity, and he left in March 2001 when his contract ended. During those years he had also designed the Union Jack coat worn by David Bowie on the cover of the album Earthling, directed the music video for Björk's "Alarm Call" from her album Homogenic, and contributed the topless dress worn in her video for "Pagan Poetry". He had done this while simultaneously running his own label and fighting to keep both careers moving in opposite directions.

• 6. Theatre and Spectacle

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  No. 13, McQueen's 13th collection, was held in a London warehouse on the 27th of September 1998. It drew from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, with Morris-inspired embroidery and a pair of hand-carved ash prosthetic legs worn by double amputee Aimee Mullins. The finale then delivered a deliberate counterpoint: model Shalom Harlow in a white dress was spray-painted in yellow and black by two robotic arms from a car manufacturing plant. It is widely regarded as one of the most memorable finales in fashion history.

  The Overlook, the following collection, was named after the hotel in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. A coiled aluminium corset made with jeweller Shaun Leane, who also crafted a spine corset and an aluminium and crystal yashmak for McQueen, was later sold at auction in 2017 for $807,000.

  The Voss show for Spring/Summer 2001 opened to an audience staring at their own reflections. The stage was enclosed in a mirrored box, unlit, which meant the audience saw only themselves for over an hour. McQueen later recalled: "Ha! I was really pleased about that. I was looking at it on the monitor, everyone trying not to look at themselves. It was a great thing to do in the fashion industry - turn it back on them." When the inner glass box finally fell away and shattered, it revealed a naked model on a chaise longue wearing a gas mask, surrounded by moths. British fashion photographer Nick Knight called it "probably one of the best pieces of Fashion Theatre I have ever witnessed."

  Later shows included a Autumn 2001 merry-go-round with models in clown make-up dragging a golden skeleton; an Autumn/Winter 2002 show with live caged wolves and a black parachute cape; and the Spring 2005 It's Only a Game collection, in which McQueen staged a full human chess game. The Autumn 2006 show The Widows of Culloden ended with a life-sized illusion of Kate Moss dressed in yards of rippling fabric.

• 7. Plato's Atlantis and the Final Work

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  Plato's Atlantis, presented at Paris Fashion Week on the 6th of October 2009, was McQueen's last appearance at a fashion show. It opened with a video of model Raquel Zimmermann lying naked on sand with snakes on her body. The collection envisaged a future in which humans, forced from the land by rising seas, evolved to live in water. The colour scheme shifted during the show from green and brown to blue and aqua. Prints moved from reptilian patterns toward jellyfish and stingrays. The armadillo shoes the models wore altered the appearance of the human foot itself. Two large cameras tracked and broadcast the entire show live on SHOWstudio, making it the first fashion show by any designer to be streamed live over the internet. The website crashed after Lady Gaga tweeted about the show before it had finished. The finale played alongside the debut of Gaga's single "Bad Romance".

  At the time of McQueen's death, 16 pieces for his Autumn/Winter collection Angels and Demons were 80% complete. His design team finished them. The first of seven small, invitation-only presentations took place on the 8th of March 2010 at the 18th-century Hôtel de Clermont-Tonnerre in Paris. Some editors who attended said the show was difficult to watch because it showed how preoccupied McQueen had become with the afterlife. The clothes had a medieval and religious character; the final outfit was a coat made of gold feathers. "Each piece is unique, as was he," the fashion house said in a statement released with the collection.

  McQueen's longtime assistant Sarah Burton was named creative director of the label in May 2010. She presented her first womenswear collection in Paris that September, carrying a house forward that had grown to 100 boutiques worldwide and revenues estimated at €500m by the end of 2020.

• 8. Legacy and Exhibition

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  McQueen's housekeeper found him at his home in Green Street, London, on the morning of the 11th of February 2010. He had hanged himself. He was 40 years old. His mother had died eight days earlier. Annabelle Neilson, a longtime muse and close friend, was the last person to see him alive, having left his home at 3:00 a.m. The Westminster Coroner's Court officially recorded his death as suicide on the 28th of April 2010. His funeral was held on the 25th of February 2010 at St Paul's Church in Knightsbridge. His ashes were scattered in Kilmuir on Skye, where his Scottish ancestry had been a recurring presence in his life and work.

  A memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral on the 20th of September 2010 drew 2,500 invited guests, including Anna Wintour, Naomi Campbell, Stella McCartney, and Björk, who performed a version of "Gloomy Sunday" dressed in a gown McQueen had designed. Lady Gaga, who had worn McQueen designs in her video for "Bad Romance", paid tribute at the 2010 Brit Awards and later dedicated the song "Fashion of His Love" to him on the special edition of her album Born This Way.

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged the posthumous exhibition Savage Beauty in 2011. Despite running for only three months, it became one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum's history. When it travelled to London's Victoria and Albert Museum, running from the 14th of March to the 2nd of August 2015, it sold over 480,000 tickets, becoming the most popular exhibition the museum had ever staged. A second retrospective, Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Victoria in 2022, juxtaposing McQueen's designs with works from art history. In 2025, the bio-play House of McQueen premiered on the 9th of September in a new theatre venue, The Mansion at Hudson Yards, built specifically to house the production and a corresponding exhibit of 27 McQueen pieces.