London:
Alexander McQueen, the renegade British fashion designer known forproducing some of the most provocative collections of the last twodecades, was found dead on Thursday morning in his London home, thepolice there said. He was 40.
McQueen's family did not make astatement about the cause of death, but a spokesman for theMetropolitan Police said it was not being treated as suspicious. Arepresentative of McQueen, who would not speak for attribution, saidthe cause was apparently suicide.
McQueen's death stunned thehundreds of international magazine editors and store buyers who hadjust convened in Manhattan for the first day of the fall collections atNew York Fashion Week at Bryant Park.
McQueen often showed adark streak in his collections, commenting on brutality toward womenand what he saw as the inanity of the fashion world, and it carriedover into his personal life. Though he had an acknowledged history ofdrug abuse and wild behavior, close friends said they were surprised bythe news of his death. He had been deeply affected, in 2007, by thesuicide of Isabella Blow, the eccentric stylist who had championed him,and he was said to be devastated by the death of his mother, Joyce, onFebruary 2, after a long illness.
"Creativity is a veryfragile thing, and Lee was very fragile," said the milliner PhilipTreacy, who had worked with McQueen. He said he last saw the designertwo weeks ago, when McQueen was preparing the fall collection that wasto be presented in Paris on March 9.
"It's not easy being Mr.McQueen," Treacy said. "We're all human. His mum had just died. And hismum was a great supporter of his talent."
At the beginning ofhis career, McQueen became a sensation for showing his clothes onravaged-looking models who appeared to have been physically abused,institutionalized or cosmetically altered, all while peppering hisaudience with rude comments. "I'm not interested in being liked," hesaid. He once mooned the audience of his show.
But he wasenormously creative and intelligent, and he seemed to sense that thefashion industry needed to have its buttons pushed. His fall 2009collection was the talk of Paris when, reacting to the recession,McQueen showed exaggerated versions of all of his past work on a runwaystrewn with a garbage heap of props from his former stage sets. He wassuggesting that fashion was in ruins.
"The turnover of fashionis just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part ofthe problem," he said. "There is no longevity."
In his work,McQueen drew on Orientalism, classicism and English eccentrics, andalso his ideas about the future, combining them in ways that werecomplex and perplexing.
As designers have done for centuries,McQueen altered the shape of the body using corsetry and anatomicallycorrect breast plates as a recurring motif. More recently, his worktook on increasingly futuristic tones, with designs that combined softdraping with molding, or ones in which a dress seemed to morph into acoat. At his last show, in October, the models wore platform shoes thatlooked like the hulls of ships.
Lee Alexander McQueen was bornin London on March 17, 1969. His father was a taxi driver; his motherwas a social science teacher. His father wanted him to become anelectrician or a plumber, but Lee, as he was always known, knew hewanted to work in fashion. His father, Ron McQueen, survives him, as dofive siblings.
Aware of his homosexuality at an early age (hesaid he knew at age 8), he was taunted by other children, who calledhim "McQueer." He left school at 16 and found an apprenticeship onSavile Row working for the tailors Anderson & Sheppard and thenGieves & Hawkes. In a story he repeated on some occasions but atother times denied, he was bored one day and wrote a derogatory slur inthe lining of a jacket destined for the Prince of Wales.
Bythe time he was 21, McQueen had also worked for Angels & Bermans,the theatrical costume company, and for the designers Koji Tatsuno andRomeo Gigli. He then pursued a master's degree at the Central St.Martins design college, where his graduate collection caught theattention of Blow. She acquired every piece of that collection and tookhim under her wing.
As he struck out on his own, McQueen wasimmediately recognized for his brashness. The models in his October1993 collection walked the runway with their middle fingers extended,and their dresses were hand-printed to appear as if they were coveredwith blood; some of it looked fresh. He also showed trousers cut so lowthat they were called "bumsters." Criticized at the time because somedid not cover the rear, the trousers were credited with initiating alow-rise trend that eventually caught on with every mainstream jeansmaker in the world.
"His was a hard show to take, but at leastit offered one solution to the identity crisis of London fashion,"wrote Amy M. Spindler, then the fashion critic of The New York Times.
InMarch 1995, at his most controversial, McQueen dedicated his fallcollection to "the highland rape," a pointed statement about theravaging of Scotland by England. The models appeared to be brutalized,wearing lacy dresses with hems and bodices ripped open, their hairtangled and their eyes blanked out with opaque contact lenses. This hadcome on the heels of a spring collection that, paradoxically, was fullof precisely tailored suits and crisp shirts.
He was called anenfant terrible and the hooligan of English fashion. The monstrous,sometimes sadistic, styling of his collections became a hallmark, aswhen he showed models wearing horns on their shoulders. A collection in2000 was shown on models with their heads bandaged, stumbling inside alarge glass-walled room with the audience on the outside as if itsmembers were looking into a mental ward. But many of these motifs wereactually based on historic scenes, from the paintings of HieronymusBosch to the films of Stanley Kubrick. McQueen once said he had sewnlocks of human hair into his jackets as a nod to Jack the Ripper.
"Nicey nicey just doesn't do it for me," he said.
In 1996, McQueen received an offer from
Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton(LVMH),the luxury conglomerate, to be the designer of the white-glove couturelabel founded by Hubert de Givenchy, whose elegant little black dresseshad been immortalized by Audrey Hepburn. McQueen, who succeeded JohnGalliano in the role, stoked the fires of the French press, however,when he dismissed de Givenchy's past work as "irrelevant." But the moveenabled McQueen, who had struggled financially, to do something he hadalways wanted: buy a house for his mother.
Though he worked for
Givenchyuntil 2001, his tenure did not produce remarkable notices, other thanfrequent reports of bickering between him and management. His departurewas typically confrontational. He shocked his employers by selling themajority stake of the Alexander McQueen label to LVMH's biggest rival,the Gucci Group. The investment allowed him to show his own clothes inParis, alongside the major French houses.
He had since openedstores in New York, London, Milan, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, licensedhis name for fragrances and a lower-priced line called McQ, and madecollections of sneakers and suitcases for the athletic company Puma.The deal with Gucci, he said, enabled him to turn his company into acommercially successful venture while retaining his designindependence. The first shoes he showed for Puma, for example, includedan image of his bare foot imbedded in the clear soles, and the suitcasewas molded in the shape of a spine.