Lee Alexander McQueen
Alexander McQueen Fashion designer. Lee Alexander McQueen was born on March 17, 1969 into a working-class family living in public housing in London’s Lewisham district. His father, Ronald, was a cab driver, and his mother, Joyce, taught social science. On their small incomes, they supported McQueen and his five siblings. At age 16, McQueen dropped out of school. He found work on Savile Row, a street in London’s Mayfair district famous for offering made-toorder men’s suits. He worked first with the tailor shop Anderson and Shephard, and then moved to nearby Gieves and Hawkes. McQueen decided to further his clothes-making career, and moved on from Savile Row. McQueen began working with theatrical costume designers Angels and Bermans. The dramatic style of the clothing he made there would become a signature of his later independent design work. McQueen then left London for a short
stint in Milan, where he worked as a design assistant to Italian fashion designer Romeo Gigli. Upon his return to London, he enrolled at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, and received his M.A. in fashion design in 1992. The collection he produced as the culminating project of his degree was inspired by Jack the Ripper, and was famously bought in its entirety by the wellknown London stylist and eccentric Isabella Blow. She became a long-time friend of McQueen, as well as an advocate for his work. Soon after obtaining his degree, Alexander McQueen started his own business designing
Lee Alexander McQueen clothes for women. He met enormous success with the introduction of his “bumster” pants, so named because of their extremely lowcut waistline. Only four years out of design school, McQueen was named Chief Designer of Louis Vuitton-owned Givenchy, a French haute couture fashion house. Although it was a prestigious job, McQueen took it reluctantly, and his tenure there (from 1996 to 2001) was a tumultuous time in the designer’s life. Even as he was pushing the limits of what people expected from fashion (one of his shows featured a model who was an amputee walking the runway on carved wooden legs), McQueen felt he was being held back. He would later say
About that the job “constrain[ed] his creativity.” However, he also made the following admission: “I treated Givenchy badly. It was just money to me. But there was nothing I could do: the only way it would have worked would have been if they had allowed me to change the whole concept of the house, to give it a new identity, and they never wanted me to do that.” Even with his reservations about his work, McQueen won British Designer of the year in 1996, 1997, and 2001, all during his time at Givenchy. In 2000, Gucci bought a 51 percent stake in Alexander McQueen’s private company, and provided the capital for McQueen to expand his business. McQueen left Givenchy shortly thereafter. In 2003, McQueen was declared International Designer of the Year by the
Lee Alexander McQueen Council of Fashion Designers of America and A Most Excellent Commander of the British Empire by the Queen of England, and won yet another British Designer of the Year honor. Meanwhile, McQueen opened stores in New York, Milan, London, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. With the help of Gucci’s investment, McQueen had become even more successful than he was before. Already known for the flare and passion of his shows, McQueen produced even more interesting spectacles after leaving Givenchy. For example, a hologram of model Kate Moss floated ethereally at the showing of his 2006 Fall/Winter line.
About Alexander McQueen was also known for not being shy about his lack of traditional good looks or his lower class background. One acquaintance described that during a first encounter, McQueen was “wearing a lumberjack shirt with the most low-class kind of schlubby-looking jeans falling down with a long key chain... [and was] quite podgy.” Another friend said that his teeth “looked like Stonehenge.” According to those who knew him closely, McQueen was proud of breaking the traditional mold of a successful designer. On Feburary 11, 2010, he was found dead in his Mayfer, London apartment. The cause of death was determined to be suicide.
Lee Alexander McQueen He worked for Lady Gaga. Her costume for her live concert or music video were designed by Alexander McQueen. His design were always being unique, strange, weired but still there is beauty. Since 2001, McQueen has been part of the luxury group now called Kering. But this show does not even answer a question that might well be posed by visitors: how did they turn any of these weird clothes into a buck? The frustrating thing about the V&A show is that there was every opportunity to chart Mc-
His Work Queen’s fashion course in the first two display areas, before the visual story unfolds with a gilded section labelled Romantic Gothic. The tone is set by a striking frock coat, inspired by thestory of Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper, from the first collection the designer created for his graduation in 1992 from Central Saint Martins. A low-slung pair of trousers, known as the ‘bumster’, is a reminder of the look that McQueen unleashed into the world of hip-hop and street culture.