Alexander McQueen: Alexander the great

The fashion world is waiting. Who will step into the shoes of Gucci supremo Tom Ford and the legendary designer Yves Saint Laurent? The smart money is on one name - Alexander McQueen. And he certainly has the talent, says Susannah Frankel

For months now, the fashion world has been dominated by talk of one subject alone: Who will replace the designer Tom Ford as the creative force at the most glamorous conglomerate on the planet? When the announcement came in November last year that Ford would not be renewing his contract to design for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, shock waves resonated throughout the industry. Ford, seen by many as the man with the Midas touch, is the ultimate fin-de-siècle designer, unique in that he seems as at home with the creative process as he is with the business side of things. He is the perfect front man, marketeer, head-hunter, and his will be a very tough act to follow...

While most in the fashion industry had been aware that complex negotiations were taking place between Ford and Gucci, no one really thought that any stumbling would ultimately prove insurmountable. Between them, however, the brains behind the Gucci parent company Pinault Printemps La Redoute (PPR), Ford and the Gucci CEO De Sole were unable to resolve their differences.

PPR has shrewdly surmised that the two jobs that Ford held are too big for one person to fill. The search is on for a different name for each of these prestigious fashion labels.

Serge Weinberg, the CEO PPR, has said that any successors will only be announced after Ford's final collections for Gucci (held in Milan in late February) and YSL (in Paris, early March). But as the international collections gather momentum, and with only weeks to go before any appointments are confirmed, the rumour mill has gone into overdrive. In fact, since the day after Ford's announcement last November, only one name has been on everyone's lips, from the industry bible Women's Wear Daily, to the pages of this newspaper, and that is Alexander McQueen. But how, exactly, does he fit into this jigsaw?

For the past three months, just about every well-known - and many lesser-known - names have been cited at one time or another. We have read about Stella McCartney (unlikely; she refuses to work with leather or fur) or Nicolas Ghesquiere (also far from an obvious choice; he's joined at the hip with Gucci-owned Balenciaga). Then there's the New York fashion deity Marc Jacobs, who is rumoured to be unhappy at Louis Vuitton. Most recently, talk has turned to Narciso Rodriguez (the Uptown Manhattan girl's designer of choice).

However, the dust may have settled, for the time being and for one of the two labels at least, on one Stefano Pilati - widely thought to be headed for the top job at the Italian brand. Pilati, formerly of the rival Prada design stable where he worked on the younger Miu Miu line and currently womenswear design director at YSL, would head up a team effort of well-respected behind-the-scene players. It would be a ground-breaking and intelligent move away from the focus on personality designers that by now characterises the big brands. Gucci, in particular, is so inseparable in the collective consciousness from "man in black" Ford, that any designer, however well respected, would seem only a poor imitation by comparison.

But what of Yves Saint Laurent, probably the most elevated French label of them all and a brand that has struggled to find its feet in an over-crowded market for 10 years or more, since long before the master of French fashion himself stepped aside? Saint-Laurent gave up designing the ready-to-wear arm of the label he started in 1998 but only retired from fashion in January 2001 following a swansong retrospective haute couture collection held at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In 1999, Gucci bought Sanofi, owner, amongst other things, of Yves Saint Laurent's beauty and ready-to-wear lines - Saint Laurent himself retains control of the haute couture - and Ford duly instated himself at the helm of the eponymous label. But while Ford has put the brand back in the spotlight to a certain extent - it has become a red-carpet favourite for everyone from Nicole Kidman to Julianne Moore - the aesthetic is considered by many to be rather too close to that of Gucci to really make its mark.

If anyone had suggested 10 years ago that the designer Alexander McQueen would take over this great institution it would have seemed inconceivable. Today, of course, it doesn't seem anything like so surprising. McQueen is one of the great fashion success stories of our time; a designer who first used his middle name, Alexander, as opposed to his first, Lee, because he was signing on when he launched in the early Nineties. He has since become an internationally recognised brand at breakneck speed. But then, anyone who knows the man behind the hype will testify to the fact that the scale of his ambition knows no bounds. True, the creative process has always come first, and in this McQueen is a rarity. He has also displayed, however, a single-mindedness and clarity of vision that is unprecedented even in an industry hardly famous for harbouring shrinking violets.

Lee Alexander McQueen, who will be 35 next month, was born in the East End of London, the youngest of six children, and attended Rokeby, the local all-boys comprehensive where, despite the overwhelmingly masculine environment, he spent his time drawing clothes. "I was three years old when I started drawing. I did it all my life. I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12. I followed designers' careers. I knew Giorgio Armani was a window dresser, Emanuel Ungaro was a tailor." After school he passed the time bird-watching from the roof of the tower block where he lived.

His career in fashion began on London's Savile Row. His mother - a genealogist; his father is a cab driver - saw an item on television bemoaning the lack of tailors' apprentices on Savile Row and her son was quick to make the most of the opportunity. He was employed first by Anderson & Sheppard, then, after two years, by neighbouring Gieves & Hawkes. It is not without note that however radical his designs, they are executed with the precision of bespoke menswear to this day. His new menswear line, shown for the first time in Milan last month, was greeted with rapturous response.

From Savile Row, McQueen moved to the theatrical costumiers Angels & Bermans, where, amongst other things, he worked on the costumes for Les Misérables, and became well-versed in the art of fashion as spectacle. Later, after a brief stint working for the avant-garde designer Koji Tatsuno, McQueen moved to Milan and a job working for Romeo Gigli, then at the height of his fame. It is from Gigli, McQueen has always claimed, that he learnt the power of the press: "He had all this attention and I wanted to know why. It had very little to do with the clothes and more to do with him as a person. And that's fundamentally true of anybody. You need to know that you're a good designer as well, though. If you can't design, what's the point of generating the hype in the first place?"

Back in London one year later, McQueen applied for a teaching post at Central Saint Martins, alma mater to everyone in design, from John Galliano to Stella McCartney. "He came for a job pattern-cutting," Bobbie Hillson, founder-director of the postgraduate course, said not long after. "We didn't have one. I thought he was very interesting and he clearly had terrific talent." And extraordinary drive. "To have left school at 16, studied on Savile Row, gone to Italy alone and found a job with Gigli - that was incredible. He was also technically brilliant, even though he'd never actually studied design. And he was still only 21." Hillson wasted no time giving the designer a place studying at the college instead.

It is now the stuff of fashion legend that McQueen's degree collection was bought in its entirety by the stylist Isabella Blow. The two remain friends to this day. Blow took the young designer under her wing and, as unofficial patron and PR, set about promoting him as the Next Big Thing. McQueen rose to this particular challenge professionally. He pioneered the by now infamous bumster trousers, a design that was pretty much single-handedly responsible for the rise of the low-rise waistband, while his tailoring - lapels so pointy that they threatened to take the eye out of unsuspecting passers by - was second to none. He was also the most brilliant media manipulator, more than happy to exploit the bad-East-End-boy-made-good stereotype and, indeed, fuelling it by brazenly admitting that, while at Gieves & Hawkes, he had written "I am a cunt" in the lining of a jacket destined for the Prince of Wales. Alexander McQueen, who, for his pains, has just been awarded a CBE, has since confirmed and/or denied the story according to how he sees fit.

"The press started it all, not me," he says. "But I played on it. It's the Pygmalion syndrome." And said syndrome went into overdrive when, in 1996, after having produced only eight collections, McQueen was made creative director at the Parisian house of Givenchy, responsible not only for ready-to-wear but also for the far more rarefied haute couture. The French -less than immediately enchanted by McQueen's rags-to-riches story - were hardly supportive of the move. Nevertheless, in the four years that he worked for the label, McQueen more than held his own, despite his making no bones about the fact that he was unhappy there.

At the same time, the designer's own ready-to-wear line - and his twice-yearly shows in particular - appeared to know no boundaries, dispensing with anything as pedestrian as a traditional catwalk in favour of show-stopping art direction, bewitching hair and make-up and an ambience that was exquisitely romantic one moment and plain macabre the next. Alexander McQueen's catwalk was showered with torrential rain one season, then burst into flames the next. His models walked on water, skated through larger-than-life-size snowstorms or twirled on a pedestal while their clothes were sprayed green, orange and black by robots hired from a Fiat car plant. The clothes, meanwhile, were increasingly lovely, from aforementioned tailoring - now longer, leaner and ultra-slick - to signature fluid chiffon and lace dresses embellished with ruffles and waterfall frill.

And then came the offer from Gucci. Givenchy is owned by LVMH. In December 2000, in a coup that must have left the powers that be at the conglomerate decidedly unamused, the Gucci Group bought a 51 per cent stake in Alexander McQueen's company in a bid to establish him as an international brand in his own right. Since that time, stores have opened in London, Milan, New York and Tokyo. The first McQueen fragrance, Kingdom, was introduced this time last year. Now showing his twice-yearly own-label collection in Paris, home to the world's most feted designers, McQueen is in his element. This season's womenswear offering alone - a recreation of the dance marathon in Sydney Pollack's 1970s film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, choreographed by Michael Clarke - had even the most hatchet-faced commentators leaping to their feet in excitement and awe. In the end, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Alexander McQueen is that, for all his status as a household name and international recognition as a designer with both commercial clout and apparently endless creative energy, he continues to unsettle his audience by effortlessly juxtaposing beauty and cruelty, vulnerability and power - and all as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Can such a raw and passion-fuelled talent possibly adapt itself to the Yves Saint Laurent brand? Saint Laurent himself thinks so, clearly, as he was all too happy to tell fashion trade bible Women's Wear Daily last month. "He's someone who is very accomplished technically," Saint Laurent said, of the younger designer, "someone who could do a good job."

If the rumours are to be believed, negotiations have by now reached contractual stage. Whether Alexander McQueen signs on the dotted line or not, however, his future at the very centre of fashion in the third millennium is assured.