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Alexander The Great

By Victoria Gill. Images by Rankin

1 Year Ago

“ A McQueen show was one not to be missed and he never failed to disappoint, relishing
every opportunity to stun and stimulate the crowds that flocked to see his collections.”

 

Thirteen years before garnering headlines for standing down in September, Sarah Burton swept into the spotlight upon stepping in for Lee Alexander McQueen after his shocking death by suicide in 2010. At that time, few people had heard of the brand’s Head of Womenswear design. Then, shortly after filling the inimitable shoes of her mentor and friend in taking over the role of Creative Director at his eponymous fashion house, Burton designed the wedding dress for the nuptials of England’s future King and Queen, and she was catapulted into the mainstream consciousness, the brand instantly becoming a household name. Whilst her departure will perhaps not be felt as keenly as McQueen’s, it will be hugely noticeable nonetheless. Time will tell whether the Maison’s new Creative Director, Seán McGirr, will be able to fill such large shoes.

However, before Sarah, there was Alexander, and it is his pure genius, unbounded creativity and incredible legacy that Burton’s successor will be charged with the care and continuation of too.

Crowned the unchallenged rebel King of British fashion, Lee Alexander McQueen was the head of a sublime fashion house, ruled by rage and savage beauty. His suicide sent shockwaves through an industry that had come to expect from him some of the most spectacular, outlandish and visionary creations that the world had ever seen.

Born in the East End of London to a cab driver father and a teacher mother, it is fair to say that McQueen’s childhood days were far removed from the fame and fortune of his later years. Growing up in a working class family in Stratford provided McQueen with the perfect guise to hide behind: the edgy East End bad boy, a persona that he would play up to time and again.

Labelling himself “the pink sheep” of the family that he struggled to relate to, McQueen had decided at a young age that he wanted to be a designer. With no apparent connections to the fashion industry, he set about forging his own and was accepted into an apprenticeship with King Charles’ tailor, Anderson & Sheppard.

McQueen previously claimed to have forgotten why a former working class rebel, with what could only be described as a cavalier attitude to authority, would be attracted to such bastions of the Savile Row establishment. Perhaps it was the refined atmosphere, the extreme professional discipline of tailoring or because “You’ve got to know the rules to break them,” as the late designer once proclaimed.

After completing his apprenticeship with the old hands of Savile Row, McQueen trained under Italian designer Romeo Gigli, who gave his shy young protégé the knowledge and encouragement needed to enrol at the renowned art and design college of Central Saint Martins in London. If McQueen’s time training under Anderson & Sheppard and Gigli were the building blocks of his early career, then his education at Saint Martins could be considered the cement.

Upon graduation there was a palpable buzz surrounding McQueen and several of his peers, but it was McQueen’s lyrical pieces that caught the eye of influential fashion stylist Isabella Blow and, in an unprecedented move, she famously purchased his graduate collection in its entirety.

Blow was the ultimate English eccentric and sorceress of talent: you could neither explain nor reason with her. Incredibly prolific on the subject of fashion and rarefied tastes; her connection with McQueen was as instant as it was influential. Blow immediately began championing the then 23-year-old, nurturing the young designer’s self-esteem and infusing him with inspiration. So that was it: the wheels were in motion; the McQueen powerhouse was roaring down the tracks to success and there was no stopping it.

McQueen’s fashion shows swiftly became synonymous with shock and awe, set in various gritty London locations: exhibitions of a kind of savage beauty. A McQueen show was one not to be missed and he never failed to disappoint, relishing every opportunity to stun and stimulate the crowds that flocked to see his collections. His fashion shows were theatrical to the point of exhaustion; his collections had the ability to silence his audiences: at once offensive and beautiful.

Constantly challenging his audience and his critics, McQueen both disgusted and amazed. His fashion shows were filled with a complexity so rare that it was breathtaking, mixing hard realism with soft romanticism, unadulterated beauty with the ugliness of cruelty. McQueen’s shows and, indeed, his own personal life, were steeped in controversy and he revelled in it.

Never one to shy away from the media, McQueen was always on hand to spice up a slow news day with an expletive-filled rant about anyone and everyone from Madonna to the Queen of England. A complex man of many faces, this uber confident, ‘mouthy McQueen’ persona was the media’s favourite but there were other, darker personalities in the McQueen repertoire. At the other end of the spectrum was the tortured McQueen, whose reputedly violent upbringing played itself out in his fashion shows, and the vulnerable McQueen who found refuge from his self-vilification in a torrent of drink and drugs.

“I don’t want to do a cocktail party. I’d rather people left my shows and vomited. I prefer extreme reactions,” he famously once said. After wowing the world with a series of presentations that stood on the knife-edge between taste and vulgarity that saw models descend the catwalk twisted by torture apparatus or besmirched with mud and blood, McQueen was faced with an offer that he could not refuse, no matter how much he wanted to. In 1996, McQueen took over from his formal rival John Galliano at Givenchy in a move that was reportedly instigated by McQueen’s mentor, Isabella Blow.

McQueen had been reluctant to make the transition. Working for Givenchy would mean betraying some of his strongest principles and toning down his attitude, but it would also finance him in continuing to design under his own professional moniker. The French couture house was willing to pay a pretty penny for raw, British talent and in the end it was this that lured McQueen across the Channel.

McQueen’s first collection for Givenchy was met with criticism, largely from the French press who branded him a “British hooligan,” the designer himself later admitting that the collection was “rubbish.”

By the time McQueen exhibited his second collection, he had reinvented the old Givenchy style in a way that both flattered the brand and, at the same time, seduced his critics. McQueen’s design method was changing; growing and evolving alongside the Givenchy and Alexander McQueen brands, transforming from a forceful, hard style into something a lot more subtle and understated. But still, his collections were considered too inaccessible by the clientele; Givenchy was garnering more press whilst under his control than any other brand, but the clothes just weren’t selling.

Under immense pressure to deliver spectacle after spectacle, McQueen was churning out over ten collections a year both for Givenchy and his own label and growing increasingly bitter and frustrated about the negative comments and poor publicity he received. After four years at Givenchy, McQueen sold a 51 per cent stake of his own company to the Gucci Group for a rumoured £80 million, enabling him to leave the French fashion house, where he had admittedly not performed his finest. Over the next decade, the young designer set about building his fledgling design house into an international empire, picking up the British Designer of the Year award four times along the way. His extraordinary technical skill and the sheer variation, and wildness, of the sources from which he drew inspiration — from English paganism to the forces of nature and ancient folklore — lent his designs an edgy quality that resonated within the global fashion community. The artistic realms of his imaginative genius were perfectly balanced by his classical tailoring excellence and historical rigour, evolving masterpiece upon masterpiece — exemplified by his otherworldly runway shows. One year Shalom Harlow’s white dress was being spray-painted by robots onstage, and the next models were suspended from ceilings, flying over the catwalk dressed in ball gowns and burkas. Leagues ahead of the fashion pack, McQueen’s raw talent was oftentimes too hard to translate into sales. Despite the praise, the media coverage and the awards, Alexander McQueen as a business wasn’t performing as well as it should have, and it slowly began to dawn upon McQueen himself that he needed to find a balance between his personal satisfaction and the financial needs of the company. Until this point, he had truly believed that it was possible to build a global brand whilst retaining the integrity of the avant-garde, but he had sold his creative soul to the devil, and now he needed to dance. McQueen himself proved to be as malleable as the fabrics which he so deftly transformed; if he strived to create a global powerhouse in an industry where appearance is everything then he would have to look the part. To that end, the plump, awkward young designer, who would reluctantly shuffle out at the end of each fashion show to deliver a clumsy bow, melted away and was replaced, almost overnight, with a slim, tanned and more outwardly confident businessman.

To those on the outside, McQueen was a changed man, but it was all purely superficial. His external insecurities had been exorcised, but the darker, more damaging internal demons had not been addressed. Death, violence and religion had always been staples within his collections, a catharsis for someone who wasn’t always as eloquent with words as in thoughts and emotions, but something had changed in McQueen. In the final few months of his life, friends and colleagues observed that McQueen had become increasingly withdrawn, more abrupt in his behaviour and, ominously, obsessed with the afterlife. The constant pressure to push the boundaries of not only his designs but also himself, proved too much for McQueen’s fragile mind and he retreated further and further into his own private, tortured world.

Looking back, friends see the suicide of Isabella Blow as the beginning of the end for McQueen. He rarely spoke about her publicly after her death in 2007; he had lost his confidante, his mentor and, in his own words, greatest critic. Three years later, McQueen’s beloved mother, Joyce, lost her battle with cancer. Her death had a devastating effect on McQueen who believed that she was the only member of his family who had truly supported him, both in his career and life choices. No matter how packed out his shows were, Joyce McQueen was always given a spot on the front row and was said to be the only person capable of taming him. Nine days after his mother passed away, and on the eve of her funeral, McQueen took his own life in a blizzard of drink and drugs.

In the aftermath of shock and confusion following the designer’s suicide, those in the house of McQueen were left in darkness and doubt whilst the Gucci Group decided on the brand’s fate. It was finally announced that, in tribute to the designer, the Gucci Group would continue to support and build on the Alexander McQueen brand, but the question on everybody’s lips was: who would take over from the troubled genius? To those who knew McQueen, there was only one choice.

Sarah Burton had worked by McQueen’s side since 1996 when she won an internship with the designer – he was friends with the tutor who’d recommended her for the role — whilst studying print fashion at Central Saint Martins. Not put off by McQueen’s odd interview questions about UFOs, Burton started the internship and later worked for the designer full-time after graduating.
It was the beginning of a 14-year friendship and collaboration, during which he would constantly challenge her, both creatively and technically, and she would become his most trusted advisor.

Burton became an integral part of the company; she managed to curb the fierce energy of McQueen’s designs and translate them into more commercial, accessible items. Although she shares her late mentor’s obvious talent for decorous and poetic grandeur, her designs exhibited a lightness of touch that attracted many new followers to the brand since she took over as Creative Director.

Showstopping creations from the Princess of Wales’s wedding dress to the custom-made black mesh body suit worn by Beyoncé for the opening night of her Renaissance tour propelled a camera-shy Burton into the glaring media spotlight. The polar opposite of McQueen, as a softly-spoken and discreet young woman, she chose to stay in the background whilst increasingly shouldering his workload in the final years. Her solo collections were a credit to McQueen, whom Burton attributed with teaching her “everything,” paying homage to the late designer’s dramatic aesthetic but with an added feminine take. She described her final collection in Autumn Winter 2023 as “an exploration of beauty and power through tailoring… The classic subverted: turned inside out and upside down. Volume is neat – strict – or exploded. Garments are dissected: slashed, sliced and twisted.” Collection overview or notes on how to describe to her successor the DNA of the Alexander McQueen aesthetic? “Thrives in the air, resists being rooted and grows in the wild,” the prose continued, in painting orchids, but perhaps also as a description of the kind of candidate who could fill the mould of Lee McQueen.

As with Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, Hedi Slimane for Dior and Oliver Rousteing for Balmain, Seán McGirr has been anointed to fill the hallowed shoes of the fashion sorcerer now that his apprentice has left. The Dublin-born designer will sit on a sartorial throne in a fashion house paying homage to its founder and namesake’s sheer vision and talent – the kind of fashion genius that only emerges once in a lifetime, but whose legacy and fate was sealed in less than a generation.

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By Victoria Gill. Images by Rankin

1 Year Ago