Alexander McQueen: the Man, the Brand, and the Shows

Few designers have drastically changed the way the fashion world has thought about clothing like Lee Alexander McQueen. He created elaborate fashion shows that expressed how he felt about certain hard-hitting topics like the treatment of women in different cultures and how history may repeat itself in the future decades. Sometimes he shocked and even terrified his audience, while sometimes he mesmerized them with clothes that showed the beauty of a woman’s silhouette. The fashion journalists and buyers never missed a show and he kept them coming back by always being unexpected when bringing fashion into the twenty-first century.

Lee Alexander McQueen was born on March 17, 1969. He was the son of a schoolteacher and taxi cab driver, and had two other brothers and three sisters. They all managed live in a small apartment together. When he was very young, McQueen would like to peek out of his third-story bedroom window and stare at the birds that curiously flew around his neighborhood. The bird watching developed into a routine McQueen created for himself. He would go outside in his yard to watch the birds fly and draw them along with clothes that they inspired. His archival collections today show this budding obsession, with flying bird prints, feathers, and structures resembling the shapes of sitting birds. Once his mother found these drawings, she realized the potential in her son. She told him to “Go ahead and try to make clothes.” because many of his distant family members were “involved in tailoring at one point or another” (McQueen and I).

As a young adult, Lee McQueen worked as a tailor at Savile Row in central London and would party at night in knock-off couture that he and his comrades would create out of things he found around the house.  In later years, McQueen would often say that he was a bored punk who would draw obscene things on the inside of coats while tailoring exquisite suits for the super rich. Besides this, he wanted to learn how to create every type of clothing available and how to execute each garment with keen tailoring. He left the stuffy offices of tailoring at Savile Row because of his boredom and looked for work elsewhere. He discovered Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London and asked for a job. Bobby Hillson, the then Course Director, had said:

  I noticed him hovering outside my office and he kept asking for a job. I knew that this was out of the question, because he was about the same age as the students and no one would ever take him seriously. But I sensed something about him and became intrigued. (McQueen and I)

 McQueen was then asked to bring in samples of his tailoring, as well as some drawings. He was accepted as a student the same day.

From there, his long time friend Isabella Blow discovered him. She was a fashion journalist who would attend events with Anna Wintor and Andy Warhol. She noticed a beauty in McQueen’s work that not everyone understood at the time. McQueen then rented out any place he could find and buy fabric with his unemployment benefits. He would stage fashion shows and Isabella Blow would bring the British press. The other fashion journalists were hinged on his unique and avant-garde clothing. Isabella Blow would always be around backstage, going through the clothes and giving him tips. Blow was the one that suggested using McQueen’s middle name, Alexander, for the label because she thought the clothes would sell better.

His empire expanded and Lee Alexander McQueen soon became known as the rebel king of fashion for his outspoken attitude and showmanship towards his fashion shows. Sophisticated members of the fashion elite would see his clothes as beautiful, but his personality as anything but. He swore loudly, made perverted jokes, and often mocked the press. However, he was actually quite humble and kind to those around him. For example, he was extremely kind to his mother Joyce, his team, his models, and his closest friends. He would always care for anyone who needed him, and would send his best clothes to his loved ones after the fashion shows.

In the spring of 1992, while studying at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Lee McQueen debuted his first full on fashion show for his classmates and other members of the fashion business. He named his collection “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims” (Savage) and the clothes matched the sense of eeriness. The color scheme was monochromatic red and black. Victorian structured overcoats were paired with contemporary slim pants and tops. With this, McQueen managed to mix vintage styles of centuries passed with wearable and easy clothes, something that became one of his trademarks throughout the years.

Once he graduated from Central Saint Martins, his comrade Isabella Blow took him under her wing, bought the entire collection, and put in an article about him in British Vogue Magazine (Voguepedia). Interested readers began looking for his shows that appeared in any space he could find like abandoned warehouses or studios. From his Autumn/Winter 1993 to Spring/Summer 1996 collections, highly tailored clothes were slashed, spray painted, and unfinished to show his ability as a clothing designer to deconstruct his clothes as well as construct them in an avant-garde way (Savage). He and his team were seen as rebels going against the system of super models put on a pedestal. They were highly creative clothiers who wanted to change the way people thought about women and different subcultures.

For example, in perhaps his most controversial collection of the time entitled “Highland Rape,” he showed beautiful women as though their flowing embroidered gowns had been attacked by tearing and staining the fabric. He also had the model’s makeup smeared and blotched, as though they had been crying. The press was outraged, questioning whether McQueen and his clothes were a suitable image to pay attention to. Lee Alexander McQueen struck back, saying:

 (This collection) was a shout against English designers… doing flamboyant Scottish clothes. My father’s family originates from the Isle of Skye, and I’d studied the history of the Scottish upheavals and the Clearances. People were so unintelligent they thought this was about women being raped- yet “Highland Rape” was about England’s rape of Scotland! (Savage)

McQueen’s love of heritage was evident in this collection, as well as many others, with it’s beautiful red tartan dresses contrasting against the lightly stained lace.

            Other known fashion creators of the time started noticing the Alexander McQueen brand and wanted McQueen and his creative team to design for them. One major brand in particular was the House of Givenchy located in Paris. The well-known fashion company wanted Lee McQueen as creative director, after only eight shows for his own brand. He accepted, and his team moved to Paris to start working on new collections for Givenchy and the Alexander McQueen brand. The clothes from the first collection were criticized for their over-flamboyancy to the classic brand. It was noted as McQueen’s first ever failure as a designer (Thurman). He came back though, as all amazing designers do, and did something fantastic; he reinvented the classic style of Givenchy in the days of Audrey Hepburn and gave the clothes an updated look with creative prints and brighter colors.

With haute couture now under his belt, McQueen was creating more sophisticated clothes for his own brand back in London. From the Spring/Summer 2000 show “Eye” to the Spring/Summer 2005 show “It’s Only a Game” McQueen laid down the aggression seen before in his earlier collections of the 1990s. He began to use more expensive fabrics in his creation and tackle more sophisticated ideas. Instead of attacking his audience to grab their attention, he directed theatrical presentations that were layered with cultural influences of different regions across the planet.

One major collection during this time was the Spring/Summer 2001 collection entitled “Voss”. This collection was held inside of a one-way glass box, where his audience had to look at their reflection for two straight hours. Then, the interior lights flickered on, and the audience could see into the stage, but the models couldn’t see out. The clothes were mesmerizing adaptations of Eastern garments like the kimono that was hand embroidered with beautiful images of ducks and chrysanthemums. There were also unconventional objects that were used in the clothes, like taxidermy owls attached to shoulders of dresses and trains of gowns made of long black feathers and pieces of red dyed plastic. Then, halfway through the show, all of the models left the glass box as a massive spotlight focused on the middle of the stage. A single dress emerged made entire of razor clam shells, and the model wearing it began to tear and break the shells off of herself in an insane rage. The show continued with westernized business suits in pastel colors until the shrill sound of loud beeping commenced, and a glass box within the glass box exploded, revealing a woman covered in live moths. The lights went out again, and the nearly hour-long presentation had ended, with the models staring at themselves in the mirrored glass.

The audience was shocked, amazed, and utterly confused. While the clothes were fantastic, the theatrics were disturbing and journalists of every kind were wondering what was running through Lee Alexander McQueen’s mind and if he was a safe person running such a grand fashion empire. The theme of the collection, as well as other collections of the time, was the treatment of mental illness. He believed that mental illness wasn’t treated correctly in history. He showed this in different collections when his models would play the part of an ill person, who would be forced to join the circus, murdered, abandoned by society, or forced to live on deserted islands. 

McQueen decided, after many years of shock and aggression, to lighten up his collections from Autumn/Winter 2005 to Spring/Summer 2010. He decided to show women that were purely sophisticated and beautiful. He looked towards the bright future of fashion, rather than the dark history of the past. Of course, edgy theatricality was always there, but it was lighter, and easier to swallow. For example, his Autumn/Winter 2009 collection consisted of revisited clothes that he had created before. This included the edgy glamor of the 1990s, with the timelessness of his work at the House of Givenchy. He put his models in a post-apocalyptic setting; with spray painted lampshades and car tire rims as hats and bags, as a form of avant-garde recycling (Savage). Most critics enjoyed it because he was showing clothes that were quite beautiful in an artistic way, while adding connotations of the worldwide financial recession of the time.

Also revisited during this era from 2005 to 2010, was his obsession with technology. This was something he lightly played around with in the late 1990s. It was mostly evident with his final official collection for Spring/Summer 2010 entitled, “Plato’s Atlantis”. Here he had his stage set up with two enormous robotic arms that housed high-definition cameras that could move on command around the entire runway. Behind the catwalk was an enormous screen where videos were displayed and where the cameras showed what they were filming on the catwalk to give a look of infinite space on the stage. The cameras were also linked to the Internet, where the show could be watched live on Alexander McQueen’s webpage.

The actual clothes of this collection are now known to be some of his best work. They told the story of hybrid sea creatures who wore twelve inch high heels that resembled armadillos. Each outfit was made of highly printed silk and leather that was created by a new invention of printing elaborate things directly onto a fabric. Here the model’s hair was braided and sculpted to heights that didn’t seem possible and special effect make up and prosthetics were added to the face to give models an alien creature look.

The constant need to be creative and better himself after every collection stressed McQueen. Under this enormous pressure, he began to develop depression after the tragic death of his friend, Isabella Blow, in 2007 (McQueen and I). She had killed herself, not able to handle her own unsettling mental complications. Despite this, McQueen continued his work, constantly pushing himself as an artist of clothing. But once again he was struck with grief when his mother, Joyce, passed away in 2010 of cancer, just three months after Alexander McQueen’s arguably greatest collection.

On February 11, 2010 Lee Alexander McQueen died at the age of 40. He had hung himself, not being able to cope with his depression and the loss of two women he loved most. Many of his fans poured out their grief with flowers and notes left in front of his apartment and his retail locations across the world. His funeral was held at Saint Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge and included many close friends, both celebrity and not. At the end of the service, a dozen or so pipers came out onto the steps of the church and played as his brothers carried his casket on their shoulders, as a final salute to the man who changed fashion forever.

Shortly after the death of the great designer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art paired with the Alexander McQueen brand and Daphne Guinness, an heiress and close friend to McQueen, to display his single greatest works in an exhibition that ran from May 4^th to August 7^th, 2011 called “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” (Givhan). The exhibition was meant to raise awareness to the fact that what Alexander McQueen was creating was, in fact, art. It was one of the most visited exhibitions the museum had ever had, bringing in all different types of people from fashion icons to tourists.

After the Metropolitan Museum exhibition closed, Daphne Guinness today tries to keep the memory of both Lee McQueen and their mutual friend, Isabella Blow alive today. She does so by raising awareness to mental illness that led to both suicides (Mead). She also recently opened up the exhibition “Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!” displaying Blow’s elaborate outfits she would wear to any event.

Also after the death of Lee McQueen, Sarah Burton, McQueen’s right hand woman, took over the company and began to continue the brand’s collections with grace and structure (Savage). She now shows the brand’s beauty with ethereal collections that make its audience feel like they have been transported into a dream that no other fashion designer could ever create. Although the man is irreplaceable, Burton has given new life to a brand that will live on.

Looking back on his work, Lee Alexander McQueen managed to create the most elaborate and stunning fashion shows ever seen. He loved to give an elaborate story to his clothes and would create sets on his runways that matched the created story. He would even go as far as altering the way his models looked, with alien-like prosthetics usually seen in today’s science fiction movies. Even without the smoke and mirrors, McQueen crafted incredible clothes that were art pieces just as much as they were garments.

Alexander McQueen inspired a new generation of young designers to find a way to make clothes that haven’t been created yet. He wanted to convey the thought that anything was possible with fashion, and to this day, because of the Internet and social media, anyone with a passion can go out and share their creativity with the world, just as McQueen did. He managed to change the way fashion was held. Instead of something strictly professional and only for the rich and powerful, he made high fashion an art that could be experienced by anyone who wants to see. He stated many times that he was a restless artist, who chose fashion as his medium. McQueen said in an interview for British Vogue in 1994, saying:

My clothes give you an intensity that you cannot bear, when something makes you feel that deeply inside, it makes you reflect on your own life. (TIME)

 He will be and has been already remembered as a creative genius of an artist who brought fashion into the twenty-first century.

The designer will also be remembered as the founder of a brand that produced fabulously elaborate clothes for shows that told stories that could’ve only been imagined by the designer himself. He will be forever missed and his death shocked the fashion world in a similar way his intensely hard-hitting shows did. McQueen allowed up and coming designers to be more and more creative and opened up fashion to the media of the Internet for the future.

Updated Works Cited

"Alexander McQueen." TIME 27 Dec. 2010: 142. EBSCOhost. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

Givhan, Robin. "Alexander McQueen's Haunting World." Newsweek 18 Apr. 2011: 36-41.       
           EBSCOhost. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

McQueen and I. Dir. Louise Osmond. Perf. Detmar Blow, Isabella Blow, Naomi Cambell. Blast!   
          Films, 2011. Youtube.com.

Mead, Rebecca. "Precarious Beauty." New Yorker 26 Sept. 2011: 60-66. EBSCOhost. Web. 04        
          Feb. 2014.

Thurman, Judith. "Dressed to Thrill." New Yorker 16 May 2011: 116-19. EBSCOhost. Web. 04 Feb. 
          2014.

Bolton, Andrew, Alexander McQueen, Susannah Frankel, Tim Blanks, and Sølve Sundsbø. Alexander 
          McQueen: Savage Beauty. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. Print.

“Alexander McQueen.” Voguepedia. Condé Nast Publishing, n.d. Web. 11 March 2014.