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CSM TIME FOR SPRING — ISSUE 6 / MARCH 2010
LEE ALEXANDER MCQUEEN 1969 – 2010
Professor Louise Wilson, MA Fashion Course Director at Central Saint Martins from 1993, is succinct in describing McQueen on the MA . ‘Like any other student, he was extremely hard working – obsessed with his vision and what he was doing. He was very tactile with fabrics, was truly innovative, was able to take risks and took a totally modern approach. One of his pieces had magazine articles papier-mâchéd onto a burnt calico skirt, which was exquisite.’ Lee McQueen graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA Fashion course in 1993. As has been much chronicled, the stylist and editor Isabella Blow crucially bought his degree work, yet it was the first collection which he, as the now ‘Alexander’ McQueen, presented at the Bluebird café later in 1993, that realised his potential. ‘That was when I realised just how talented and complex he was, swept along by the sheer force of his imagination,’ says Bobby Hillson. ‘The overall effect was extremely beautiful, the clothes entirely white and worn by barefoot models. He also shrewdly presented something new in fashion – the bumster trouser. Cut to elongate the back, shorten the leg and reveal the bottom’s cleavage, the innovation introduced a brand new erogenous zone in womenswear that was based on a homoerotic ideal. It was a first taster of what New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn described as McQueen’s trademark ‘erotic blend of masculine tailoring and feminine underpinnings’.
Lee Alexander McQueen at the Blow Family home in Gloucestershire, photographed by Gary Wallis, Senior Lecturer, BA (Hons) Graphic Design
‘I’ve met some students of yours in Italy and they said I should come and see you,’ announced Lee McQueen, standing diffidently outside the first floor office of the then Central Saint Martins MA Fashion Course Director, Bobby Hillson in 1992. The Savile Row trained 23-year-old wanted to learn pattern cutting and had brought along a selection of his cutting work at Romeo Gigli. Impressed and intrigued by his skill and versatility, Bobby Hillson instinctively asked him if he could draw. When he replied that he ‘did all the time’, she made up her mind to discover more.
His drawings convinced her. ‘I said there and then I can’t offer you a job but I can offer you a place on the MA . Then I went through and told Jane Rapley, then Dean of Fashion and Textiles, that I’d offered a place to an amazing boy who was enormously talented.’ With over 20 applicants for one place it was an act of faith – in McQueen’s talent and dedication, and in the idea that the MA course was the right home for him.
McQueen once said: ‘If you don’t have passion for something, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’ But Bobby Hillson concedes: ‘It was very tough for him to begin with, partly because he’d worked first. He’d interrupt lecturers, giving them the benefit of his opinion, arguing his point. But once he’d relaxed and found friends among the other students – particularly textile designer Simon Ungless, with whom he later collaborated – the MA course worked for him. And at Central Saint Martins he had the freedom to ‘block off commercialism and do it from the heart’ as he put it.’
‘Every part of my background comes from something, be it the Jacobites or the Huguenots,’ McQueen explained. ‘His interest in history was profound,’ says Alice Smith of Smith and Pye, his first agents, who wrote on his brand new file after their first meeting ‘This is a Star’. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so absorbed in getting it right – his complete focus was his work. His drawings were beautiful, very architectural, with precise, full-length slim figures. And he loved fashion then. He would run up our stairs saying ‘fashion, fashion, fashion, fashion’ over and over again, leafing through the magazines, looking for what was interesting, exciting.’
Presentation Paris 9 March 2010 © Chris Moore
Later, when he signed with the Gucci Group in 2001, McQueen had a more measured but no less dedicated view: ‘You strive to get that perfect equilibrium and you try to crack that perfect ideal of creativity and commercialism. I believe in my integrity, and I believe the sole purpose of fashion is to create and not accumulate.’ Professor Wilson describes him as pushing the boundaries of the female form not only in general but specifically with the bumster, ingeniously influencing the high street with what was a marvellous combination of skilled cutting and homoerotic vision.
‘His aesthetic had never been seen before. His work had an anger, a spirit, a sense of woman diametrically opposed to anything that was happening at the time. His shows were like the finest theatre. Basically, his work sent a shiver down your spine, and very few designers can do that. His legacy is immense and he will be referenced for years to come.’ Lee Alexander McQueen, born London 17 March 1969, died London 11 February 2010. The writer, Judith Watt, is a fashion historian and consultant. BA Fashion and Communication pathway senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins and contributor to British Vogue, she is editor of The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Fashion Writing and author of Ossie Clark: 1965 –1975 and Dogs in Vogue.