Lee Alexander McQueen
Lee Alexander McQueen, aged only 40 and found dead by his own hand on the eve of his idolized mother’s funeral, was a gay fashion designer of undisputed genius. He combined Savile Row craftsmanship with rare imaginative style, from rippling visions of Kate Moss to the intersexual video posturings of Lady Gaga. His last act inevitably stirs memories of the shooting of Gianni Versace in 1997. Self-described as the “pink sheep” of his Lewisham-born family, McQueen was always confidently out and gay, as reflected in his bizarre and spectacular shows. It is significant though that he once compared his creations to armour, giving protection to the wearer, hinting at an inner vulnerability which had its own unerring cut and motif.
Recent Facebook comments on trying to cope with his mother’s death have been readily linked to the earlier suicide of Isabella Blow who snapped up his graduate collection and closely embraced his career. As the youngest of six children, Lee’s mother virtually raised him; allusions to his taxi-driver father are scant, but he once accused him of violence towards his sisters. Renowned for being conflicted and temperamental within the industry, there is much about the eternal feminine in McQueen’s work.
From Alexander McQueen's Spring 2010 collection
So close was Oscar Wilde to his own mother Speranza that he allowed himself to be arrested in accordance with her wishes, and suffer in Reading Gaol for breaking Victorian indecency laws. “Her death,” Wilde nevertheless confided, “was so terrible to me that I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to to express my anguish”. Entertainer Liberace’s mother always had a front row seat at his glittering theatre performances; his devotion to her was perjoratively referred to as “momism” by the critics. However, to attribute McQueen’s demise directly to some cloying mother love is too simplistic.
The highly inventive runway extravaganzas that McQueen became famous for exhibited everything from surrealist-inspired accessories involving living moths and lobster claws, to sartorial S&M with shades of bad boy, “bumster” and bondage. One fashion collection took its cue from the eerie Australian movie Picnic at Hanging Rock, another played on the creepiness of childhood images, yet another evoked Plato’s fabled Atlantis. As an expert scuba diver, McQueen said he plunged beneath the waves to “escape people”, and his lifework has a motif of submergence from the armour-like clothing behind which his celebrity clients could hide and feel protected, to the diving suits he donned.
As candles and flowers are left outside Alexander McQueen’s Old Bond Street shop and the press gear up for further revelations, gay men lucky enough to possess one of his suits may already be picking open the lining to see if it conceals a message in tailor’s chalk like the one he confessed to writing inside one bought by the Prince of Wales - it read, “I am a cunt”. Did he mean Charles or himself? Concealment, submergence, the need to escape,to hide the secret offensive joke at the expense of rich and famous patrons - McQueen’s death is a modern parable of the gay closet and its clever disguises in our time.
By John Hartley
(c) Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
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