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Sminky-Pinky.
Minks.
You mean like a... JIV-II
A "V"? All right.
Lots of people say, "I discovered Alexander McQueen."
But you don't discover talent. Talent's there.
You open doors for talent. You push it through or you help it along.
No one discovered Alexander McQueen. Alexander McQueen discovered himself.
Lee had this very strange CV.
I wasn't very good at school.
I was always drawing clothes in every lesson,
in science, in biology and...
But I used to enjoy art most.
When he left school he wasn't sure what he wanted to do.
He was out of work. Looking for work, I should say.
Because my husband's very strict on the children going out to work.
We was watching a television programme one evening
and they was saying that they couldn't get apprentices
to work in Savile Row.
So I just said to him, "Why don't you go and try?
"Just knock on the door. They can only either say yes or no."
And that's exactly what he done.
Anderson & Sheppard started in 1906.
We like to do things slightly different to other people.
We have a house style.
That's what we're going to teach the apprentices to make.
I was taught by a master tailor from County Cork in Ireland.
He was the best tailor we had on the premises.
You start off padding collars, putting in pockets,
but you're expected to make a full jacket
ready for fitting by the end of the first year.
As soon as you put it on,
it should fit like a glove and you know it's made for you.
I knew I couldn't survive in a place like that for the rest of my life,
cluttered in a small workshop, sitting on the bench, padding lapels.
But I did have a passion and I was good at it.
I was good at tailoring a jacket. I was quick at learning trousers.
I wanted to learn everything. "Give me everything."
It was the beginning of the '90s
when I had a bespoke tailoring shop in Mount Street
and he just walked in one day.
He looked like a skinhead,
but he just told me he can cut a frock coat
much better than the 50-year-old tailor I had.
So I was very curious and I just told him,
"OK, show me what you can do."
I never really made clothes in a traditional way.
I was experimenting myself
in how to create structure and volumes.
I'd begun to just take in material, any material.
And, by putting them all together, somehow you can start to create
this three-dimensional form.
He wanted to understand
why I'm doing it this way or that way.
When Lee was 17, he said, "I'll make you a couple of skirts. ”
And I've got to say, they fitted like a glove.
They were so fitted to my body
I couldn't even move my legs, hardly,
but I used to get compliments on this skirt.
I did use to wonder,
"I hope he finds the right thing for himself in life."
He was a sweet boy from the East End,
looking to make money.
We needed technical help,
machinists, pattern cutters.
We needed people who had hands-on experience
in making clothes.
He gave me no attitude, was never late,
always knew what he was doing, always delivered.
He listened continually to Sinéad O'Connor, which was quite odd.
No one else liked Sinéad O'Connor at the time
but he really liked her for some reason.
I always remember him with his Walkman on, listening to Sinéad O'Connor.
Three, two, one, ignition.
Lift-off.
Red or Dead was this very young streetwear company.
When I said to him that the Space Baby collection
was based on the anniversary of the men landing on the moon,
he was like, "What?"
He didn't know that you could take a subject
that had no relation to clothing
and actually get inspiration from that to design clothing.
So, he didn't understand
this idea of visual research
or historic references or sexual references.
We copy you on the ground. The Eagle has landed.
He must have asked me questions,
"What can I do next? How can I push myself forward?"
And at the time
all the designers in Italy were opening diffusion lines.
He went to Italy with no language,
no place to stay, no money, no qualifications.
I thought, "Within a week he'll be back with his tail between his legs."
A week later, maybe 10 days,
I get a call from Lee from Italy.
He'd landed a job as an assistant for Romeo Gigli.
To say I was shocked was an understatement.
I said to him, "OK, I'm looking for a new jacket.
"I have in my mind this shape
"but my tailors, they cannot reach that shape.
"Maybe you can help me to do it."
And we start to do that jacket
and within the first fitting
I say, "No, it's wrong. That is not what I'm looking for."
So with the tailor, with Lee, they did one more.
We did the second fitting and again I take out the lining,
look inside the jacket and it was wrong.
Third fitting I say, "No, it's incorrect."
And I take out the lining and inside the jacket
Lee wrote with a black pen,
"Fuck you, Romeo."
That was a time when I was looking for new shapes,
for shapes, for shapes...
And he was looking so deeply and hard.
He was really deeply looking to understand everything.
He was leaving my studio
because he wanted to study more and more and more.
You can't teach talent.
But what you can do is make them better at what they do, or more professional.
And to me, the whole thinking behind this MA
was to make them work in teams, working together,
as you do in the fashion world.
I saw this unprepossessing, I must say,
very shabby,
very unattractive...
I hate to even say this but it was true.
...boy with a bundle of clothes over his arm outside my office.
So I said to him, "Who are you looking for?"
And he said, "I've come to see you."
But I had no job, which he said he was after.
The whole thing intrigued me. He was passionate.
And to me this is the secret, really.
You... If you tap into that.
I found myself saying,
"Well, I think you should come on my course."
And I couldn't offer him money. That was really sad.
And it was patently obvious he had none.
Aunt Renee said she had money in the bank,
sitting there not doing anything, and she would rather help Lee.
She'd worked in the rag trade.
She knew that Lee had talent.
And he came back and said,
"My aunt is going to pay the fees
"and I'm coming."
Saint Martins was the place to go.
But what I liked about it was the freedom of expression
and being surrounded by like-minded people.
We got on really well because we had the same sense of humour.
And he laughed all the time, so he was just funny and disrespectful.
And he'd do catwalk shows down the corridor. He'd just muck around.
Whenever he could muck around, he'd muck around.
I was teaching there at the time as well.
And he was not frightened to tell people, "I know better than you."
Even the tutors.
He was a bit of a nightmare student because he knew so much.
I'm sure he was a pain and did interrupt people.
He didn't actually dare interrupt me.
But he used it. He used it as I intended him to use it.
And he'd come to a painting or a book
and, not having had a formal education,
it was all new to him.
And that was it. He reinterpreted things in his way.
It wasn't filtered through, as with a lot of us
who'd had more conventional backgrounds.
I loved that.
He knew where to go for everything. London was his town.
"Where do I get my buttonholes?"
He'd go,"You want to go to Martin in Soho."
"If you want fabric, then you want to go to Berwick Street, Shepherd's Bush."
He would take me to gay bars and he would take me to lesbian bars
and he'd, like, sit me there and he'd go,
"This is what you want. This is what you want."
I'd go, "No, I just want to go home. Can I just go home and do my homework?"
The course always ended with the degree show.
No other college had ever been invited, as Iwas,
to show during British Fashion Week.
He called me when he was finishing the final collection
and asked me to come in to have a look and talk to him about it.
It had all the elements.
H had the history of the East End.
It had the darkness, Jack the Ripper stalks his victims.
It had the research. It had a really great story behind it.
He was reading books like Perfume,
which is all about the murder of women,
and he had a very dark side to him as well,
so he was drawing from a“ of these influences
and then creating something very beautiful out of it.
The pieces went past me and they moved in a way I've never seen.
And I wanted them. They were modern. They were classical.
He would do a black coat and then he'd line it with human hair.
And it was blood-red inside so it was like a body.
It was like flesh with blood.
And I just thought,
"This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
it was about sabotage and tradition, which is the perfect combination,
and beauty and violence.
All the things that t suppose the '90s represent.
How difficult is it to discover genius?
Not at all difficult, cos they have it and I spot it.
If you're interested in late 20th-century clothes,
Isabella Blow is a big player.
I was at American Vogue and Anna Wintour discovered me
and I worked for her and then I went to British Vogue.
McQueen was her knight and she was gonna take him to the top.
She was determined.
I just knew. I rang up his mother and said, "You've produced a genius."
You know, he's like the Saint Laurent of the year 2000.
And his mother said to him,
"Look, there's this mad woman who keeps trying to call us.
"She wants some of your clothes."
I rang between six and eight times a day.
Finally I got a little voice on the end of the line, "Hello?"
I said, "Can I make an appointment with you? My name's Isabella Blow."
I don't know to this day if he knew who I was.
No, I just wanted the money. I was desperate for money.
I wasn't interested in him either. I just wanted the clothes.
I didn't give her no money off.
I said, "That's 350, love. You can take it or leave it."
And...
And she loved that.
It wasn't until I went to the Bluebird Garage collection
that he did that I...
Well, I just thought, "What have I unleashed?"
And he walked across and said, "I owe it all to you,"
which I thought was very, very sweet
because it was far from true.
He'd worked every... Every inch of the way himself.
Every fashion designer wants to create an illusion,
create things that disturb and fascinate people.
Clothes are really beautiful to work with,
but there's also a reality outside.
Some people don't want to hear it.
It's all lovey-dovey and everything's fine in the world all the time.
And I tell it the way it is.
In the '90s, you used to make clothes to go out.
You used to make something just for that night.
You're going to this nightclub. This person is on, or that DJ.
"Right, what are we going to do?"
t think Lee took everything. t mean, that's one of Lee's strengths.
He took a lot of Bowery/s aesthetic.
It's transgressive, it's in-your-face.
And he thought, "How does this translate onto a runway?"
Lee also used that language of fetish
in terms of rubber and latex and leather
and put it into his fashion design.
We started going out with each other but part of me was thinking,
"But also it's quite useful cos I can sew as well. "
It was literally anyone that could sew.
It didn't matter whether they were any good at sewing or not.
Were they willing to come and sit in the studio
for, like, 16 hours a day?
And were they going to be fun to be around?
Lee was the badly-behaved, naughty school boy
that was always doing pranks on people in the pub,
and that's the person that I liked and loved.
At the time I first met Lee, Iwas living in Hoxton Square,
and one day in pops this guy
and I kind of figured he had rented, you know, the downstairs.
"Come in for a cup of tea. Come in for a cup of tea."
And he asked what I did.
I said, "Oh, you know, I do grooming for men, hair and make-up. "
And he goes, "Oh. I'm having a show soon.
"Would you do the hair and make-up for the guys?"
And I was like,
"Don't you need to see some of my work first?"
I'd never done a show before, you know, so...
And he's like "No, no, no, no. I can tell. I can tell."
He said to me one day, "I've decided to do my own collection. "
I remember thinking "How on earth does he think he's gonna have a business
"and make a collection?
"He's got nothing. He's got no money, no wherewithal, no studio,
"nobody to support him and nothing behind him."
And yet he was determined this was what he was going to do.
I survived on unemployment benefit
and I bought all my fabrics.
I bought all my fabrics with my dole money.
And I went round to my parents for baked beans
and tins of soup and things like that.
This is my pooch.
He said to me, "I really need to get a logo."
We asked my boyfriend at the time if he would design it.
It was my idea to put the "C" inside the
but then Dave designed the rest of it.
He was fantastic at getting people to do a phenomena! amount of work for him.
And we were never, ever paid.
In fact, we were paying him to work for him.
How amazing is that?
Just to be pan' of it, be part of his vision, yeah.
He had that, even from the very beginning, that pull.
It's so bohemian. Warhol.
Yeah.
Dance your way to success. Come on!
Isabella was very keen to call him Alexander.
She thought it sounded better as a designer.
It sounded grander and more romantic.
Issie got criticised for trying to make him posh.
So what? Good for Issie.
She was just trying to make him successful. And she did.
Alexander McQueen is a brand.
Why do you love her so much, Lee?
Cos she's the same as me. She doesn't care what people think.
At the end of the day we're...
We're separate entities to everyone else
and we have our own personal view about things.
When you fall in love with something,
you nurture it and you look after it like it's your... Garden.
People garden, they cook, they do the same thing.
My ingredients are clothes.
She introduced him to everyone. She championed him.
So I suppose what initially started as a work relationship for her
became a creative friendship.
She was someone that was always really excited
and wanted to see the next thing and the new thing
and wanted to push people.
It was never about money.
I never saw any money going backwards and forwards between them.
I just remember the laughter, the exciting creativity of the mid-'90s.
And the adventure they were on this rocket they shot to the moon.
I'm sure you're a hungry little thing.
The early days were very happy days.
They were short times, but they were beautiful and they were funny.
Issie didn't have children
so she threw her maternal love to her protégé.
I looked forward to seeing him cos he made me laugh so much.
Issie and McQueen had a very dirty sense of humour.
McQueen would describe Issie as a cross between Lucrezia Borgia
and a Billingsgate fish wife.
Issie had a very vulgar humour.
I always found the cocks and the cunts slightly...
Always a bit... Oh!
I wasn't really into their earthy humour.
However rude McQueen got, Issie was even worse.
They loved to play off each other like that and be outrageous.
I know Alexander loves birds
so I've got this bird hat on designed by Philip.
We're going to do some falconry tomorrow cos Alexander's got a very...
He's passionate about birds.
We're going to fly some falcons tomorrow afternoon.
We did go and stay at Hines a few times.
You would end up diving into Issie's dressing-up box
and we'd all be wearing
fantastical costumes for dinner and things like that.
The world she inhabited was so far removed
from the world that any of us had come from.
There was a sort of unreality to it.
Whenever we went to that house, you just felt so at home.
And I think Lee felt very at home there.
(Detmaq They had this big sister, a fun person to be with, who was outrageous.
With Issie, "Be as different as you can.
"And keep going!
"The more different, the more I love it."
I really don't like the norm. I don't think it's...
You don't move forwards, seriously.
You just don't move forward if you play safe.
You really do piss a lot of people off.
His first shows were unbelievable.
People were winded by them.
People walked out. Quite a few acerbic reviews.
But everything else before paled into comparison.
I don't wanna do a show that you walk out of
feeling like you've just had Sunday lunch.
I want you to come out either feeling repulsed or exhilarated.
As long as it's an emotion.
If you leave without emotion, then I'm not doing myjob properly.
So that's that.
That's the thing about Alexander. I think his clothes are very emotional.
This coat is, like, based on a tramp,
so it's based on someone who hasn't got any money,
standing in the street, nowhere to sleep.
You wrap it round yourself, you feel fantastic.
Then you have all this passion and love
and slashing and sex and romance.
The idea of the collection was never to produce.
The shows were all about publicity
and creating a marketing ploy for Alexander McQueen, the designer.
They were impossible to reproduce.
They were made of plastic bags or masking tape.
They were show clothes.
Lee started doing bumsters.
These were cut so low that you could see the model's pubic hair.
It's nothing to do with pubic hair.
It's just a technical thing where, as a tailor,
you're breaking up the proportion of the body
by lowering the trousers, elongating the torso.
It's nothing to do with bum cleavage.
It's an added bonus if you've got a nice bum.
He told that mannequin,
"Put your pubic hairs in Anna Wintoufs face."
It's just funny, naughty behaviour.
You could give Alexander £500
and he could produce 30 pieces of clothing.
He saw some cling film and said "I'm gonna make a dress out of that. "
'Tm going to put the model in it, wrap her up."
And he just cut this dress, put a zip in it
and suddenly that went down the runway.
Getting a tyre and running it over the suit.
Things like that. Just genius.
£4 worth of lace.
Invisible zip, £1.
Sprayed with car spray paint.
They probably cost less than £10, those dresses, to make.
But, through that weird alchemy of being cut and made by Lee,
suddenly they're being requested.
Avedon wanted to have this dress for Sharon Stone.
So it has to be in America now.
"We need someone to fly over with the dress on Concorde."
That still upsets me to this day. I didn't get to go on Concorde.
It was me.
That's almost the period where I think,
the madness really kicked in.
The show was brilliant but I'll wake up tomorrow and think,
"I've got to get a bottle of milk. Where am I going to get 42p from?"
We went to a McDonald's.
We got two cheeseburgers, two fries, two Cokes.
And I was that tired that I just dropped the tray
and then we had to pick the food up off the floor.
And I thought, "This is a weird world,
"that you've just shown the finale of London Fashion Week
"but we haven't got five quid to eat."
That's how it is. People have got to understand that.
You're doing fucking fab shows but you've got to start living.
The Clothes Show, you know, BBC One.
At the time 12 million viewers. You're 22 years old.
You're not in any of the shots
and you're dictating the terms on how you're going to appear.
Because I was doing the shows
on money that I got from unemployment benefit,
I could not afford to show my face on camera
because I would be arrested for working as well as signing on.
- Did it piss you off? - No.
It should have done. That was the idea.
I really worked that East End yob,
this juxtaposition between a hooligan and someone that uses a needle.
And people couldn't fathom it.
So it was new. It was a breath of fresh air.
Savile Row, Cockney geezer, ding dong, all of that.
He was aware how seductive that was.
I get a bit annoyed when I read that.
He was far from a bad boy.
In fact, he was a very loving, happy child
and very generous.
Beautiful face, huh?
I just remember this one time when I went round his house.
I think I said something was shit or something in front of his mum.
He turned round, glared at me and said,
"Don't you fucking swear in front of my fucking mother."
We were never what people called poor.
My husband was a London taxi driver.
Even though there was six children,
they all had everything that they should have had.
I don't know, it just seems...
Like, honest, an honest place round here.
You know where you stand, if you know what I mean.
If someone's going to mug you, they tell you before they do it.
I'm onlyjoking.
From our granddads, he got the sense of humour,
which was, at times, wicked.
I think that he struggled coming out of that background
and going into the world.
I made the choice to come out to my father.
I'd told all my brothers and sisters and aunts,
but my father was a London taxi driver.
He would come home at night and say,
"God, I nearly run over a bloody queer last night in Soho."
I'd have to deal with this.
My dad could be a bit cutting sometimes, but he was joking.
And if you didn't know him, you'd probably take that the wrong way.
Lee's father was saying, "Sell your clothes in Brick Lane,"
never quite understanding what Lee was doing.
My dad wanted me to be some sort of mechanic or something,
but... It never worked out that way.
From our nan he got that storytelling,
that dark romance of the Victorian times.
I think that really lent itself to his visions
of the stories that he wanted to tell.
It's all right, Mother.
Oh, Mother, come here. No, I'm too ugly.
She was very strong and powerful
and quite a lot was unsaid,
but, my God, you realised there was a really strong bond between them.
She made him feel like he could do anything.
I always encouraged them to read
and have lots of books
because I myself loved history and things like that.
That's one about a Highland clan.
She was looking into the genealogy of the McQueen family
and aimed at proving
that the McQueens came from McQueens of the Isle of Skye.
It opened up his world.
He was born in Stratford, but he knew there was this other life for him
which came from Scotland.
She encouraged the sort of fantasy
and excitement of those stories
and Lee went with it.
You have two types of Scotland people will associate themselves with,
the Vivienne Westwood romantic Scotland, swathes of tartan silk.
My ancestry is the Jacobites of Scotland.
The war of the English and the Scottish
where the English raped loads of women, killed clans completely off.
It's like a form of genocide. It was then.
And people don't realise this.
I mean, take Bosnia. How many dead people have you seen?
There's millions of dead people in Bosnia.
It's just genocide in the end.
People have got to realise that it still goes on in the world today.
There was something different about him.
He had this artistic energy in him rather than like a fashion designer.
I rang his mother and said, "I want to work for your son."
She gave rne the address and I went one morning
and ever since, we were working every day
on the Highland Rape collection,
trying to get the pieces ready.
There were times
when he hadn't yet started working on the collection and it was due soon
and he would do one drawing after another,
after another, after another, after another
and there was a collection in one evening.
Very quick, very fluid.
He was also very creative at night.
His adrenaline was much more alive
and we usually used to put music.
He would listen to the piano and it became very important.
The composer Michael Nyman became part of his team.
I was just enjoying myself to watch him
because he was sitting like an old lady,
his needle and his thimble.
You can feel like he's...
It's kind of a therapeutic work for him.
He went into a sort of zone.
I always used to say his eyes went black
because he suddenly was focusing on what he was doing
and he almost couldn't hear anybody else.
He could draft a jacket, free-hand,
just with a piece of chalk, so he wasn't using measurements.
He could just, from his eye, read someone's body measurements
and then be able to draw that out onto a bit of cloth.
At heart, Lee was a romantic,
and that romantic is because of that physical relationship
to what you produce,
which then comes back to that idea of craft in a way.
The family always got invites to the shows.
It was very important that my nan was there.
He really wanted to make my nan proud.
Aunt Renee and Mum made sure that the models had some sandwiches.
Mum would have probably done her sausage rolls.
We were all, as a group of young, really cool, English models,
so excited to see this man that had this reputation.
I was just amazed. All these people, photographers...
And I thought, "My God, they're all here to see Lee.
"I hope they're not disappointed."
Because I thought,
"This is just Lee from Stratford."
The darkness,
the going to the depths and the recesses of one's mind
to come up with such things like Highland Rape.
"I'm going to send down loads of girls who look like they've just been raped."
And then we were all looking like we'd come out of a hedge backwards
and I was going, "Is this the hair and make-up?"
They're not easy garments to look at.
They do look like something from a crime scene.
I honestly just thought that he really just didn't like women,
he didn't like the models, he didn't like anything,
he was just trying to torture us all.
But his vision,
when you actually came down,
and the silhouette
and the way he made you look was so extraordinary.
I don't think I really understood, because I was 15 at the time,
exactly what was going on or the connotations of it.
It wasn't until probably the next day that I read the newspapers.
And, you know, there was quite a backlash
of the statement of the show.
I mean, it was pretty intense.
But he made every single headline and that's what he wanted to do.
And he sure got it.
Judith Church, MP for Dagenham,
thought there was no excuse for such a show.
The very title of the show, Highland Rape,
has been done to shock people. It's been done to attract publicity.
It has succeeded and that, in a way, is sad,
because I think women want to look at fashion,
but they don't want to see it
in some way as portraying them as a victim.
I'm not a misogynist. The idea was saying to the public,
"A man takes from a woman. The woman's not giving it."
That's what rape is.
My oldest sister was badly beaten up by her husband.
When you're eight years old and you see your sister strangled by her husband,
who's now dead, thank God,
you know, all you wanna do is make women look stronger.
You might not like the honesty he was presenting you with,
you might find it distasteful, shocking or aggressive
or misogynistic, but for him it was his truth.
Those garments all tell you about Lee
and they're almost like confessional.
They do relate to things that happened in his childhood.
We were just in our flat. It was literally in the middle of the evening.
And he said, "Oh, by the way, I was abused
"when I was a child by my brother-in-law. "
It just came out and he started crying
and then we started talking
and then, almost as soon as he started telling me all that,
he said, "Anyway, t don't want to talk about that any more."
The stuff that he saw, I mean, the violence against my mum,
the abuse he suffered by my dad and the abuse my mum suffered by Dad...
They had that affinity together. They shared that, Lee and my mum.
They were both affected by the same person.
And they had that connection through that, you know.
And Lee saw my mum very much like a mother figure
and somebody that he wanted to protect,
but my mum wanted to protect him as well.
I had quite a big burden on my shoulders.
Erm...
But I'd always felt close to Lee
and...
In the early years, Lee had seen things like domestic violence and,
at the time, it must have also had an effect on his mind.
And that stuff he had to get out,
I think it was a way of exercising his demons,
a way of protecting women and himself by creating these strong women
who looked like they had armour on.
It was armour for his heart as well, you know, so...
The relationship between me and Lee,
I joke that it was four seasons long,
purely because I think those collections and those shows became markers
in terms of how our work life was also tied up with our relationship.
And, looking back on it now,
I can see the reasons why it would be...
How could a relationship work
with all the things that were going on in his life,
all the things in his past?
I can't think of any relationship that would be able to deal with that.
When you went to St Martins, in the first year you'd go to Paris
and the idea is that you're meant to go to exhibitions.
But we would just spend all of our time
wangling our way into the various shows.
So we went to this show and it was...
It was all very floral and there was chiffon and Lee was going,
"Well, that's rubbish. That's rubbish. Oh, my God.
"This is just the worst show ever. Bloody hell.
"Givenchy, that's a load of crap!
"That's for, like, old ladies.
"I never, ever want to work somewhere like that."
It was a really exciting time to be covering the industry
because it was changing, it was evolving.
People like Bernard Arnault were buying up small family brands
and then turning them into global corporations.
And first he brought in John Galliano
and, after two years, moved John over to Dior
and then needed another new, young, hot flavour
for Givenchy.
And so he said... Why did he want you?
He said when I was hired that I was his horse.
I don't know if that's in looks or what, but...
But he said I was his horse he betted on.
I was living with Lee when Givenchy called
and he thought that they wanted him to design a handbag.
And I'm like "Wow. WOW!"
"Cool man!" You know?
Next thing I know
he comes in and he basically says
they've asked him to be creative director of Givenchy.
And I was like, "You are kidding me!"
He called me at work and then he said, "They've offered me this job.
"If I move to Paris, will you come with me?"
I was like, "Yeah, of course."
It was sort of exciting and also quite scary as well
because it was still that honeymoon period of our relationship.
Why did you go to Givenchy, having already created your own name,
having won British Designer of the Year twice in a row?
For one reason, the money was good.
But what do I do with the money from Givenchy?
I put it straight back into McQueen. It helps me employ people for McQueen
to build my own company up.
Very talented people that he brought with him to Givenchy.
What a team!
He told me, "I will need a team to work with me
"so I was thinking of you.
"So, think about it and let me know."
There's nothing to think about. Of course, I'll take the job.
We took an aeroplane from City Airport.
We were the weirdest people in the plane. It was all businessmen.
And we were there with our bleached jeans,
with a lot of attitude.
Where did you find this? In Japan.
Really? Yeah.
Oh, oh!
There was huge excitement. Cos imagine being that age
and you're being given that amount of, one, responsibility
and also that amount of money.
Statue!
There's Sebastién Pons.
Hello, Sebastién!
- Sweaty armpits. - Come on!
God, you've got wet patches.
I think that in the McQueen studio I was a little bit like the bouffant
because I was the funny one there.
They were taking the piss out of my accent.
A Spanish bouffant in a British court.
Simon Costin.
God, you're looking fairly gross today.
I saw myself as the person that put things into context.
The set was always there to reflect
the sort of untold story of the collection.
There was Katy, of course, Katy England.
Katy's the most important part of McQueen.
Camera up, please.
She's the Tweedledee to my Tweedledum.
She fuels my imagination.
I help research the collection.
I, erm, bring things to his attention
that I think might be important in fashion.
Basically, I'm always there at the right-hand side.
Shaun Leane was very much involved in the business, making jewellery.
What do you think, eh?
Fancy a dance?
For me to do work Hke this is very good for me.
It allows me to go from one extreme to the other.
And now I'm going into different areas. I'm working with body jewellery
and it's really going into a form of sculpture.
Sarah Burton.
Sarah was the intern.
He looked at us
like the sort of pillars
that would make him feel secure.
We had this really nice flat.
I loved the area. I mean... Place des Vosges. I mean, hello?
Oh, God, that's pretty scary.
Thinking about it now, it was tiny.
When I would come over to start working on the set,
I'd be on the sofa.
Ooh, ooh!
Sebastién!
Oh, language!
I always ended up sleeping in Lee's room
because Lee was always collapsing on the sofa.
Lee!
- You changed the pillows. - Yeah, fucking right.
We had a driver so we got driven everywhere.
Oh, wait a minute, he's gone blurry.
That's better.
Say hello to the people of England.
Such fun.
We can do some funny tricks.
Hello, I'm on speed, baby.
When we arrived at Givenchy,
everybody was kind of like
bending their head to him
and calling him Monsieur McQueen,
which was like, "They're calling you Monsieur McQueen? Here?"
Cath! Woo-ooh!
When we arrived I think they were in shock.
The way we dress, the way we work
and the jokes we made.
Obviously it was very grand, with chandeliers,
so it was very different from the working environment in London
which was a very, very small room, chaotic, with stuff everywhere.
Here I have my own office.
I pick up the phone and I get what I want.
Cos I want it, I want it, I want it!
So I ask for it.
We was just like a bunch of young kids running about in Givenchy.
Were they surprised you were chosen?
Well, I think that it put most people in a coma when I got chosen!
All of a sudden, we're there,
sitting in Hubert de Givenchy's house,
looking out the window and you see the Balenciaga sign
and you knew that Yves Saint Laurent was there
and knowing that John Galliano was there
at Avenue Montaigne, just a few yards from there.
And there we are with Alexander McQueen,
being the new talk of the town.
And I felt special.
He was trying to find his feet there.
He obviously had to make a huge impression
because it was his first collection.
I remember telling Lee,
"Everybodys looking at us and we have nothing."
And he always would answer,
"Don't worry, Sebastién, we'll get it done."
This is Paris and Paris chic. This is Givenchy, this is not McQueen.
This is where elegant suits are made and fantastic fabrics are used.
I mean, it's going to take my own label, McQueen,
another 40 years to get the reputation this one has.
I remember once we saw this beautiful work.
Lee asked Catherine DeLondres, who was in charge of the atelier,
"Who's done this fabulous work?"
"She's not allowed to come in."
He's like, "What do you mean, she's not allowed in?
"Please let her in."
I remember from that day on Lee wanted to see the person
who has worked directly with the garment.
And I think they loved that.
This is the Bet Lynch dress.
And we also treated it, bonding plastic over the top
for raincoats so you get the whole ensemble.
None of us spoke French
and the French atelier didn't speak English.
Lee would actually draw in the air how it would have to be.
Yeah. Yeah, it's OK.
Oh, it's OK. I thought it was just pantalon.
They're quite precise and like... They, like, take the threads out and...
I just get the scissors and go, "Whack it off!"
And they go... Like that.
And I go, "It's OK, it's only clothes."
I'll never forget the expression on her face.
But in the end she saw exactly what he was doing.
She was in awe.
A very mutual, you know, respect grew between the two of them.
Haute couture is about the atelier. I come from Savile Row.
So I have great respect for the tailors.
They deserve just as much praise as I do.
Lee, one day he said, "Where can we go and eat'?
"Where do the workers eat?"
And then Catherine said, "There is a canteen
"in the basement for the workers."
And Lee was like, "So let's go there."
When we went down there, the people, they're flipping out.
"Alexander is eating with us!"
They couldn't believe it.
These fashion houses, they treat the designer like he's a king.
And they treated Lee like a king,
but Lee didn't want to behave like a king,
Lee wanted to behave like a regular person.
OK.
The ideas for the show,
they grew out of the collection as the collection developed.
He would pull threads and stories out of that.
And there was always mood boards and things pinned all over the walls.
Everyone fed in. it was a very group practice.
But Lee was the spider in the centre of the web, as it were,
pulling everything together and distilling
what it was that he had in his head.
I remember the fraughtness about a week before the show
with things coming down and not right and things having to be changed.
It was really insanely crazy.
The pressure was super intense.
In 25 days to put a 55-outfit collection together
is not an easy task.
The first couture show had the theme of the Golden Fleece,
Jason and the Argonauts.
They wanted it to be amazing.
My first feeling from Alex's description was,
they had to be warriors
mixed with goddesses.
I said, "We do horns?" He said, "Yeah, but do big."
I said, "But how big?" He said, "You know Genghis Khan?
"He's the junior size.
"Give me the senior."
It's the 19th of January 1997
and, as they say in the trade, we're about to witness a fashion moment.
At the tender age of 27,
British Designer of the Year Alexander McQueen
is about to show his first haute couture collection.
Every model had to have a character,
an identity, a signature.
Every single girl could have been a show on her own.
Where did the inspiration come from? He told me, "From the logo."
The logo is the Gs, which looks like a Greek motif,
and the Givenchy label is white and gold.
Always with Lee's collections, there were some pieces where you'd go,
"God, that's rather risqué."
I think a tot of the press focused on the ones
that were a little bit more crazy or a little bit, you know, unwearable.
French designers were complaining and saying,
"Oh, they're not even French and they're taking over Givenchy.
"Look what he's doing to Givenchy."
I think it was them saying,
"I'm still gonna be who I am,
"regardless that you put me in this posh space.
"I'm still who I am."
I liked that, that they stayed true to who they were.
They actually brought England into Paris in their own unique way.
People were talking, fashion editors.
"He has a big mouth. He has a big head.
"Oh, the British! What does he think?"
And then I understood that basically the world was against him.
And you do your first show.
It's not a huge success. No, that's true.
Well done.
They were wishing to see him crash and be destroyed.
They have claws and knives
and they're throwing everything into your back,
which is fine cos I'm a good fighter!
I remember us afterwards.
You know, Lee was...
Oh, hellish, yeah.
That was a really horrid night. It was a difficult night after that.
A few punches and arguments.
I think he's done a lot with the house,
because Givenchy have had a lot of press.
It's a more difficult thing to deal with cos McQueen is McQueen in London.
Givenchy is taking over from another man in Paris.
As Alexander says,"It's like taking a dinosaur out of the sea."
And I think in one season he's done that.
So I think in a year he will have done 20 times that.
Givenchy changed everything.
The fun times were over.
I had an accountant who spoke French.
They were going to Paris to sign the deal.
And I said, "Please, make sure Issie gets something out of it."
And then I kind of did ask McQueen
and he said, "Issie and I are not about money."
When the money did come and Alexander cut her out...
That was very tough.
Their friendship changed. She was so hurt at this rejection.
She'd have created a buzz. She'd have had a salon at Givenchy.
She'd have made it the most happening place in Paris.
I do remember going to Hilles straight after the takeover at Givenchy.
You cannot imagine the tension between the two of them in this room.
These designers think that you made me.
- And it's never been about that. - No, they don't.
- I know that that's... - But they do!
You see it all the time in the press! They say, "Oh, Isabella Blow,
"responsible for Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen."
- No, they say... - They do just say that!
But it's never been about that for me and you.
Whether I was part of it?
Does that annoy you that they put a strap on it?
"As discovered by Isabella Blow." Does it piss you off?
No, not at all, because Issie has helped me a lot in that way,
but not in the way that she's like...
She does it because she loves my clothes,
not because she loves me.
Exactly. That's the point.
Because I can't stand her guts!
I'm joking.
I do remember sitting there, thinking to myself,
"Please, lay off Issie because she's done nothing but help you,
"but you seem to be giving her a really difficult time."
Issie kingmaker.
This is the man she championed and then he resented that
and wanted to be his own man
so there was no position for Isabella Blow at Givenchy.
Punishment.
And I remember McQueen turned to me and said,
"I'm the tycoon now, Detmar."
And it wasn't meant affectionately.
We had a policy. Don't show hurt, don't show weakness.
Keep your head up, keep proud, keep fighting.
Something will turn up. It's got to.
His star ascended and hers didn't as much
and, you know, he slightly abandoned her.
Then Issie suddenly got this job at The Sunday Times
and McQueen said, "You've been resurrected, Issie. "
And I thought, "No thanks to you, mate."
I saw myself within the press and in the public eye as the gazelle.
And the gazelle always got eaten.
And that's how I see human life. We can all be discarded quite easily.
The fragility of a designer's time in the press.
You're there, you're gone.
It's a jungle out there.
I went to his London studio
and he was talking about a haute couture show.
"I tried to please them and then I fucked it up.
"I'm gonna do my own thing.
"It's gonna be very McQueen, the next one.
"Fuck you! Fuck you, all of you. I'm gonna show you."
We went from this sort of... The hallowed halls of Givenchy
into the sort of rough, gritty Borough Market,
people just sweeping all the rotting fruit and veg up.
It's nice to show them the rough pan' of London,
make them a bit scared, look over their shoulder once in a while.
It's nothing to do with couture.
Now you've got your own studio.
We're in another chapter, in another world, in another McQueen.
All camera crews go round the front gate.
The London shows were always...
The audience, the expectation, was so great.
The shows in Paris were far more formal and reserved.
People would scream their heads off in London.
It was crazy, people literally fighting to see the catwalk.
Lee just running from model to model
and screaming and shouting at everyone.
Simon, we want to start the show!
And just always moving, always dressing, always stressing.
Stressing and dressing, actually, together.
Are we all standing by, ready to go?
OK.
Where's Russell? Is he out there? Is he getting ready?
Yeah.
One of the models was late.
He said, "Fuck her" and he started the show.
He'd just go, "Right, Jodes, just go for it. "
He used to psyche me up.
I used to literally get out onto the catwalk and go...
It was really the first time
the collection kind of seeped out into everything,
from the energy that was in that space to the effect it had on people.
A sort of angst, an anger and fear,
that was woven through that show.
We were mind-blown
because they didn't look like models.
They look like animals with this big hair
and this animal make-up.
It was like...
It was intense.
Some students that weren't allowed in
stormed the barricades and kicked over a“ these fire pots.
And then the fire started.
Cos there were a pile of crashed cars
and I don't think we'd emptied the cars of petrol.
The car's actually on fire.
There's a fricking car on fire on the catwalk.
And everyone thought it was part of the show.
"Don't you...dare go out there with fire extinguishers.
"Just keep sending them out. Keep sending them out."
Had that not been rectified, that whole tent
and all the top fashion editors and models would have been history.
That's just back to typical, wonderful, mad, brilliant Lee.
Did you move out of London and settle in Paris?
I stay in both. I'm here for six months and in London six months. All over.
My dog is in London and I'm missing him. I'm missing my dog.
TraveHing between the two cities to do Givenchy and McQueen,
of course it would take its toll.
But he did it.
And he managed to make the shows amazing.
By that time there was so much more pressure
because he was also doing his own line and then having to do
ready-to-wear and couture.
You could see the beginning of the pressure that Lee was under.
The favourite company of LVMH was Dior.
Lee felt they were really comparing him with Galliano.
And then he sort of found out
that John had four times more budget than him
to create his haute couture collection.
The house we loved was the McQueen house.
Givenchy was like a stepbrother.
We knew that our time there had an expiry date.
When we arrived at Paris Lee's clothes tended to be very rigid
and I think in Paris
he got to discover the soft side of things.
We took that and we brought it to London.
For No. 13, I remember him very happy.
Lee had it very clear in his head what he wanted to do.
We all left the meeting thinking,
"Oh, my God, he has it very dear this season."
"He knows what colours, he knows the shape..."
He himself was feeling at peace.
The first show I ever worked on with Lee, he liked the idea of robots.
Lee kept going on about it,
"Oh, I'm gonna have this robot, this model. "
And we were like "Oh, no! The robots again. Oh, my God."
We were just hoping he was gonna forget the idea.
But then, the night before the show, the robot did turn up
and we didn't have a dress to go with the robot.
I went back to the studio.
I was like, "Guys, we need to make a dress for the finale."
We went under the table and pulled all these jewels out
and he was like, "Hey, there's the dress."
They told him it was impossible
and he said, "No, it's not. You can do it."
That's what Lee did for people, he made them do the impossible.
We got some technician down to operate the robots and Lee was,
"Oh, yeah, let's make the robots do more of this."
He's directing these robots like they're actors
and, consequently, you end up with this incredible choreography,
her spinning.
You had Shalom Harlow there and these two robots going round.
And the thing is, the robots looked like they had a mind of their own.
I think that's the first time that I was blown away by my own show.
That man and machine thing at the end was... I'm still in shock, really.
It's the first time I've cried at my show, so...
Yeah.
Lee was living his dream.
He would never have given the work up, as hard as it was,
because you get that one chance in life.
The first time I knew that Lee was actually getting very famous
was when some stranger came up to us
in the supermarket and asked for his autograph.
And I remember him saying to me, "Oh, my God, that's so scary."
And I realised then that something was happening.
He was breaking outside of fashion and becoming famous.
That whole celebrity thing, people chasing after him.
You got the feeling he was saying,
"This is not the important thing. This fame is nonsense.
"The important thing is what I do."
I sometimes wish he'd had a normal life
and that he could just be a normal person
in terms of not having that pressure of everything at such a young age.
I knew Lee when he had nothing but a rubbish bin full of clothes,
so I saw very quickly him become a millionaire and more.
And the more money he had, he seemed to be more unhappy.
With the money came drugs.
And that was the sad thing.
When did it become bad?
Well, it became bad when the pressure became too much for him
and he obviously started dealing with it
in ways he shouldn't have, unfortunately.
With cocaine came an aggressiveness,
that kind of anger, that sort of paranoia.
He still made some great clothes,
but the personality changed.
All the hard work I do. I do 10 collections a year.
And it's hard work.
I didn't go to Givenchy, they come to me.
I got really upset when people started saying
I was gonna get fired when it wasn't true.
"Sod the lot of you. I do what I like."
There was definitely a change
and definitely a move in our relationship.
He had two sides to him.
He could come in a super cool mood,
like, full of laughter and that,
or it could be
a devil crossing the door.
He was obviously a very troubled person
and the darkness created
this amazing creativity and genius artist.
T had a tattoo saying McQueen on my arm.
I got it covered up and when he found out,
that was kind of like the end of everything.
Lee was a romantic.
I think that he flirted always with the idea of love.
I'm not sure whether he ever achieved it.
The big thing in his life that he was in love with was his work.
And also he didn't trust anyone.
He thought,
"If the boyfriend is not here, it's because he's with someone else."
And that made him suffer a lot.
People forget fashion's always been about attracting a mate.
H's about sexuality, showing a person who you are.
I'm sorry if you think I'm stupid.
Even though I'm chubby and I would like to look smaller.
I mean, let's be realistic here.
When he changed his appearance,
he said, "I changed myself. it was the wrong thing to do.
"I lost touch with who I was."
What was it? Ten years from Lee, little Lee McQueen,
satin the corner of my studio sewing away,
to this svelte figure dressed in Comme des Gargons,
having to become something he didn't really want to be,
this son' of persona, this Alexander McQueen.
6:00 in the morning.
Don't! Don't do that to her. Oh, Simon.
Oh, my God.
She's only got a few hours left.
It wasn't fun any more for me.
That was the bottom line. It just wasn't fun any more.
I don't like the camera much.
Turn it off now.
I've never done better work than my time with Lee.
There was times that were dark with him and times that were very bright.
And we all chose it. We all chose to be there.
We all chose to not be there sometimes as well.
I collapsed once in Givenchy
because of the pressure and the workload.
We had a price to pay and it was our health.
I grew in the company, of course.
I wasn't the little boy that I started there.
As I grew up, I realised that...
I was feeling like I was a little bit claustrophobic of the situation.
Sebastién! Oh, Sebastién...
Come on, you ugly bitch.
Ooh!
It was like full devotion to the McQueen house.
Looking after his dogs,
endless hours of working
and weekends either working
or socialising with Lee.
We were going also on holiday together.
I even know how to fake his signature, you know.
I was feeling, like, trapped.
Even if I loved what I was doing.
I tried to... To speak with him
and that didn't end up that well.
The day I told him I was leaving, he told me,
"Well, you'd better think about it because there is no way back."
And I left and it was really sad, you know.
My leaving, you know, it was...
No one...
No one, erm... No one came to...
After all the work I've done and...
Unfortunately, Lee took things quite to heart
without maybe thinking about
what the other person was going through
or what they needed
and he would take it very personally
when someone would leave or he felt betrayed.
A lot of people around fashion do suffer from anxiety,
do suffer from panic attacks, depression.
The industry is feeding this ego.
And it has a very negative effect.
For the Voss show the original concept was a padded cell.
You start losing who you are and it becomes a darkness
and a place that you can't get out of.
And, of course, Lee being Lee,
he wasn't happy with just this one great idea.
You then had to have another box in the middle
as a kind of theatrical climax to the show.
When he came and sat down to explain what it was,
he wouldn't look me in the eye and he was saying,
"Yes, it's about death and beauty and rebirth."
"It's gonna be beautiful."
I really wasn't expecting to be recreating
Joel-Peter Witkin's famous incubus image.
It's a pretty gruesome image
and I'm thinking, "Oh, my goodness, am I gonna do this?"
And I was like, "All right, then, I will do it,
"but I want you to know... "
Serious face. "...that I'm doing it for an'. "
And he looked at me like I was mad
and then he looked away and he went,
"I thought we all were, weren't we?" And he was off.
The actual set had that Stanley Kubrick 2001
meets an insane asylum feel.
And there was a two-way mirror so that when the fashion people,
when the fashion press came in to wait for the show to start,
they were ail looking at themselves in the mirror.
The music started, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum,
with this heartbeat that went faster and faster and faster.
We didn't know what to expect, what was gonna happen.
None of the audience knew at all.
Fashion is a big bubble and sometimes I feel like popping it.
When the show starts, boom, you can see inside.
But the models can't see the audience at all.
it was suddenly a much more kind of voyeuristic thing.
The bandages he put on a“ the model's heads
so it had that slight feeling of unease and sickness and a bed/am feel about it.
There was one time that I'd just come out of surgery
and he came to visit me
and he saw me and I had bandages everywhere.
I was all bruised up and he was like, "Fucking wicked!", as he would do that.
He absorbed things like a sponge,
saw the beauty in the ugly,
as with the bandages on me.
Life isn't perfect. We're not a“ perfect size-zero models.
But there is beauty within the eye of the beholder.
For the final image to be this one
of a large woman with moths everywhere, it sounds like a joke, really.
But I do think there's a sense of humour going on underneath there as well.
It's fat birds and moths.
I mean, isn't thatjust fashion's worst nightmare?
Every season whose collections do I look at?
Whose collections am I jealous of in a sense?
Whose collections do I think are absolutely amazing?
Tom was literally God In the industry.
I guess, even if Lee was a rebel
and he was a totally different kind of person,
he probably was flattered and, you know, touched
by the fact that someone like Tom Ford noticed him and wanted him.
Also he was smart enough to know
that he needed that financial help.
The wonderful thing about Lee is he is poet...
He won't like this either, but it's true.
...poet and commerce united, because he's very practical.
So he understands you can express whatever you want on the runway
but you need something beautiful on the hanger to sell to a store.
Gucci Group was smart. They saw what the potential was.
And they offered McQueen a deal he thought he couldn't refuse
which was, "Here, we'll underwrite your company
"and give you 50% of the ownership."
They had secret meetings
so none of it would get back to Arnault
and the LVMH people.
They had no idea it was coming until it hit them.
I was quite adamant when I talked to Tom
that this was a one-man band.
So they leave you alone to design what you want?
Hundred percent.
I was looking for major investment
and then Gucci got in touch and...
The rest is history.
Au revoir, Givenchy.
Got ya!
What are you doing?
I have an affinity with the sea. I don't know, maybe cos I'm Pisces.
And when it rains and it snows
and you're near the sea and you can hear the waves...
H's very melancholic but it's very romantic.
Sometimes you need to have a break
to get away from everything
and not to think about business and fashion shows
and to take time out.
I have to be surrounded by nature.
This is older than the house.
This is over 400 years old. It's an elm tree.
And we uplight it at night.
And, like, it's good inspiration.
All my friends come here and, you know,
we have the fire on and we watch DVDs and listen to music.
It's nice and relaxing.
He would be spending time with my mum a lot, down the cottage.
I'm grateful that we had that time together.
We'd see more of each other and we did things together.
My family keep me grounded.
Fashion can be a very superficial business.
When I started in London there was nothing like this.
It's as close as we can get to haute couture in England.
All the people here are students and it's, like, training them up
and giving them that initial step into the world of fashion.
Lee knew from when I was a little boy
that I loved to draw and I was always very artistic.
A lot of time had passed and I was working at a rubbish tip
and Lee had the position for a textile designer on menswear
and that's when he took me on.
Lee was really happy having me there,
firstly on the creative level,
but secondly just having
something that reminded him of his past
and his childhood.
Let's have a look.
There was a period when it wasn't so good and I had a lot of angst.
It was kind of hard. There was a lot of confliction in my head
with doing a job that I didn't wanna do, which was Givenchy.
But I think I've come to a stage where
I just accept this is my fife, this is what I was born to do.
Oh.
I like you like this.
He controlled the vibe wherever he went.
A lot of the time he was such a buzz to be around.
The way I put it, it was like he was the queen bee
with the worker bees responding to the signals from that queen bee.
And people felt that, you know.
He had this kind of childish way
of mucking about in the studio environment.
It just made things so fight and such a nice place to be.
There was always something creative happening.
That's what excited everybody.
I speak so loudly in my work itself, you know.
I think everything I do is personal.
Even turning Kate Moss into a hologram is kind of personal. It's ethereal.
It's a time I'm feeling at one with the world and heavenly.
If you want to know me, just look at my work.
What does fashion mean to you?
My life.
Issie died proud,
having achieved beyond her wildest dreams.
The fact that Issie went was a huge blow to so many people,
including Alexander.
A huge blow.
I saw him at Issie's funeral and I've never seen anyone so devastated.
I couldn't recognise him.
He sat right behind me and I turned round and saw this person
in a Highland kilt and a hat, looking very sad.
I thought, "My God, it's McQueen, Alexander."
And the look on his face was haunting.
I felt...
I felt for him.
You could just feel... You could just see the pain.
He suffered.
I could see the love.
Never deny the love.
It was such a love affair between those two.
Issie seemed to slot in
between a sister and a mum.
She was in the middle and Lee just loved Issie.
The connection between Issie and McQueen...
They both carried sadnesses.
Alexander had been abused.
He felt that person had destroyed his innocence.
Issie had this very sad instance when she was about five years old
when her brother that she was playing with died.
Not Issie's fault, but she always felt responsible for him
and carried that guilt.
There was a destructive side and destructive issues
which she could never resolve entirely and they would blow up.
It became more and more serious.
I don't take drugs, but I take medication.
I mean, sometimes I have to take a pill, just to keep me calm.
The pathway to her self-destruction was clear.
Issie, perhaps, was thinking she didn't want to go on forever.
She couldn't rein vent herself as an old woman
cos fashion's all about youth.
Discovering people is a big thing. It's like being a mother.
And the milk's dried up.
Issie was planning her death.
So she wanted to say goodbye to McQueen.
And she organised a weekend.
She'd gone to a lot of trouble with a very lovely menu.
And Alexander was exhausted when he turned up
and just stayed in his room.
Whatever she needed, he wasn't able to give it himself.
But they did see each other, yeah. There was a farewell between them.
Big hug and kiss and...
"See you in the next world." I don't know.
The thing is, when you're ill, you don't know...
You're very alone.
Issie had ovarian cancer at the end.
If it was terminal, who knows. She wasn't interested in chemotherapy.
The last thing Issie said to me,
"Do you remember, Detmar, when I was a ray of sunshine?"
And I said, "You'll always be a ray of sunshine."
McQueen is calling his show "La Dame Bleue."
He's dedicating this show
to his late great friend and mentor, Isabella Blow.
You could see her in the clothes.
You could smell the perfume of her around.
And you could see her children, in a way, backstage,
Alexander and Philip going crazy together.
What bonded them was Issie.
Isabella single-handedly invented Alexander and myself
from nowhere
with such conviction that... We will never experience again.
Her belief in you made you be the person you are.
Bomb Once you sat down and you saw the set and the music,
you were there and it held you,
because I kept seeing her in the clothes that he was putting on the catwalk
and the hats, of course, that Philip was designing.
It was actually creating some mythical figure
that was like Issie's presence at the show.
So emotional.
I just couldn't stop crying,
just bent over double.
And, erm...
Grief is grief. You have to go through it.
And then to see them come on and realise how young they were
and they had lost a great friend
and how they had loved her.
I think it had a big effect on Lee.
After Issie passed away,
he was in a really dark place.
We were watching TV in the evening
and Lee McQueen opened the news that day
with the Horn of Plenty show.
And my father was sitting there and he's like, “Sebastian, come over.
"I think it's your crazy friend's fashion on TV."
And when my father saw the collection, he was like,
"I think your friend has gone really mad."
And I think with Horn of Plenty
that really reflects the fashion world today,
a pile of crap.
Three years of being apart,
I think a lot and I think he thinks a lot also.
And when I called him, it was like, "Hello, Lee?"
"Hello?"
"Lee, it's Sebastién."
"Where the fuck have you been all this time, you fucking bastard?"
We just started again like... Like the brothers we were before.
So then I took the ferry to Ibiza
and I went to his villa.
When he opened the door, I was in shock
because the person who opened the door,
he was a different person, he was really skinny
and looking very fragile and very, very pale.
When I hugged him, that's when I noticed
something has changed because...
His body structure was just bones.
There was hardly any muscle or flesh there.
Lee come in with the idea of having an invitation for a show
that had that metamorphosis.
He wanted his face to transform into a skull.
Everything in his life had just led to these feelings of torment.
Lee was HIV positive.
Even though it isn't a death sentence as such,
I think it was always in the back of Lee's mind.
You'd feel the bad vibes when Lee was down.
There was a real depression that was brought with that as well.
I think the trouble is with Lee,
after a show, when you've done that build-up and you've worked hard,
you could see there was a little bit of a down.
And then onto the next show.
Again.
Yeah, it was just show after show. I don't know how Lee did it.
The pressures kind of quite immense now
because of the Gucci contract and, erm...
You know, the...
I do the men's now and now I also do McQ,
so it's about 14 collections a year again,
same as when I was at Givenchy, so it's hard work.
He would have liked the idea of moving away
and just leaving everything behind,
but as it was his name above the door and his reputation as a person
and everything he had built, he couldn't just abandon it.
If I ever get that old and I'm still around and I leave my company,
I'll just burn the place down so there's no one working there.
Really? So you'd never let someone carry on
the McQueen tradition or the McQueen brand
if you weren't actively involved?
Erm...
I don't think so. I mean, it doesn't...
It... Because that person will have to come up with the concepts for my show
and my shows are so personal.
How can... How can that be?
I said, "Why don't you just step away, Lee, for a year?"
And he just said, "You don't understand."
He said, "I'm responsible for 50 people.
"They've got to pay their mortgages. I can't just stop."
I was always thinking
there's so much sadness in him,
and that was sad, you know,
because he was this successful, flamboyant being
who actually was so lonely deep inside.
It can be. It can be really lonely.
And I think...
You know, I think there's more to life than fashion
and I don't want to be stuck in that bubble of, "This is what I do."
It's nice because you see everyone in the office.
They go home and they can shut off
but I'm still Alexander McQueen after I shut the door.
Do you know what I mean? I've got to go home with myself, so...
You know, if you've had a bad day,
I've only got myself to answer to, so...
I mean, with us, he was, like, behaving...
All right, OK,
but deep inside we knew that he wasn't...
He wasn't 100%.
He could hear voices.
He was telling me that they were chasing him.
One thing he used to say,
"Paranoia will destroy ya."
I remember doing a drawing
which, basically, has got lots of cameras around.
We're thinking, "Maybe the cameras could be on robots."
It was always about getting the camera right in your face
and it's surveillance, making the audience a bit uncomfortable.
The idea behind Plato's Atlantis
is where people come from the land and go back into the sea.
He loved swimming, scuba diving.
He loved that feeling of just being in a different world unden/vater,
just away from everything,
almost like you're back in the womb, floating.
You know? And that kind of serenity you would get through that.
Plato's Atlantis was kind of like a study in his head
with all the digital printing
and all the experimenting, pattern-cutting.
And the robots were there again.
He said to me, "I designed my last coflection, Sebastian."
And he told me, "I've had enough with all this.
"I am gonna kill myself."
"What do you mean, you're gonna kill yourself?"
He's like, "Yeah, I...
"I am fed up. I've had it with this.
"L just wanna put an end to it.
"And in my last show, in the end..."
He said, "Do you remember Voss?
"So, I'm gonna do the same sort of thing,
"but it's going to be a Perspex box the size of a human being.
"So, when the show ends,
"this box is gonna come up from the ground
"with me inside.
"And then I'm just...
"I'm just gonna shoot myself."
And...
And I...
I mean, I just didn't know what to... How to react to that.
You know what I mean? Because“.
He sounded so convinced.
It was like he thought
that the whole fashion "system" was against him.
And I said, "No, no one is against you.
"But if you are thinking to do this,
"you're gonna harm so many people
"because people come to your shows to see your beauty,
"your talent, your creativity and
"to see you, to see your work."
He was like a movie director.
We had to be like aliens and he told us this.
He said, "Listen, you have to have this face.
"Strong, you know. You have to be powerful."
With this show, he kind of threw a bomb on us.
"OK, this is it. Finished. Everything is finished.
"We are reborn. We're starting anew.
"New chapter, new planet."
I was really scared.
I tried not to picture myself falling.
I wanted him to be proud of me
and I wanted him to be proud
that he has such an army of models.
Endless print designs.
It might have been a fish's fin or scales from a snake,
and then manipulated and montaged
into a repeat pattern.
And it became something else, unrecognisable.
This was the turn of the digital age coming into fashion.
It towards the end he wasn't that happy,
why his best collection is there?
He knew he needed something revolutionary.
And I think Plato's Atlantis is, I'm sorry.
I didn't go to Plato, my mum not being well.
She was on dialysis at the time.
Lee didn't really want to face the fact that we was gonna lose Mum.
Because he'd lost Issie,
he wasn't, erm,
dealing with Mum not being well.
After my grandmother Joyce passed away,
he was in really bad shape.
Lee was distraught.
We was sitting in the living room at my dad's
and he didn't look himself at all, Lee.
I mean, we was all taking my mum's passing bad.
I think we was all worried about Lee because obviously Mum and Lee...
Lee idolised my mum.
The lastjob he gave me to do
was designing the gravestone.
He liked the idea of the wings wrapping round the gravestone
to kind of embrace my grandmother Joyce.
Originally, I had hands
which were facing down on top of the gravestone.
But the hands for him facing down was holding them down.
He wanted them uplifted, so he turned the hands upwards.
I called Lee
and
we spoke about
Mum's funeral and...
And that was the last conversation.
The night...
Iwas in bed, I was reading, and I felt...
I felt something touch my head.
Very softly and very gently.
I touched my head and I said to myself,
"Who's here? Who are you?"
I knew someone had passed and was saying goodbye.
I got a call at half past 9:00 in the morning
from my sister.
And then that phone call...
Just changed...
Everything.
I just really couldn't believe what I was hearing
because itjust seemed so surreal in that moment.
Just the vision in my mind of Lee being sort of all alone
and doing that as well
was playing through my mind, you know, and it's quite...
Er...
It's not the nicest way to go, you know.
Suicide, alone, hanging.
It's, erm...
I just don't want to think what was going through his mind,
how lonely he must have been as well, doing it.
The fashion world is in shock
over news that Alexander McQueen has died...
The darling of British fashion has been found dead after...
He used to say that a lot.
"One day
"I'm gonna come home inside a body bag."
And that day when...
The news opened again that day
of him leaving his house inside a body bag.
I'd taken my kids to Hamleys' 100th-year celebration
and my partner picked me up and said,
"I've got..."
I can't do it. It'll just be really silly. I'll just cry.
He said, "Lee's dead."
And it was just such a shock
and I was so angry for a really long time.
Because you think just... "How do you...
"How did that happen?" You know? He's...
I think that
perhaps after my mum went
that he felt there was nothing that could make him happy any more.
And I just think it was in that moment that
he had that emptiness.
I miss him a lot, yeah.
I miss that... That... You know...
He could have had, like, some really great happiness in his life
and he didn't quite have that in his personal life.
And... That's what I wish... Wished for him most.
Yeah.
I'm so happy I got to...
To meet him and to...
To share
part of my life with his story and everything.
But I miss him.
I wish
things ended in a different way.
He wanted to make really beautiful things
and he sculpted in clothing.
He was a sculptor really, I think,
and that's where that silhouette came from.
His clothes made me feel that you could be feminine,
but at the same time, you know, "Don't fuck with me, I'm a bitch."
The thing I remember best is seeing him working.
It was magical.
For me, he was like a magician.
One outfit would just be insane
and then the next one would just be genius.
Nobody could create emotions in a show like Lee McQueen did.
Fashion for Lee was a way of just communicating a whole world
and he wanted to take himself out of the picture,
for people just to focus on this art that he was creating.
Raucous, bolshie, incredibly funny, incredibly driven.
Not only did he have a singular vision, but he was a very singular individual.
And his strength of personality was quite phenomenal.
You just don't see many people like that.
They don't... They don't come up very often.
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