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Alexander McQueen: Gucci's top geezer

He may be owned by Gucci and have cut his way to the top of the fashion establishment. But he showed in Paris last week that he is still an enfant proud of his terrible label. Now the East End boy, 34 today, has his home town in his sights...

Sunday 16 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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Alexander McQueen is master of the fashion show as spectacle. He has, in the past, sent models out with their heads wrapped in nets of fluttering butterflies. He has placed them in glass boxes which shattered to reveal that they were filled with live moths. His twice-yearly presentations have been showered with torrential rain one season and burst into flames the next. He thought nothing of showing one particularly memorable collection in a still-consecrated church.

His designs are equally remarkable, playing on the tension between softness and severity, power and romance and, most notably, beauty and cruelty. Hard-edged tailoring and torn and ruffled chiffon and lace are both signatures, as is sexually charged leather. More often than not, models' identities are masked by elaborate hair and make-up. It takes some nerve to disguise the faces that lesser designers would kill to have promoting their clothes. And McQueen has nerve in spades.

Last Saturday night in Paris, he unveiled his women's ready-to-wear collection for autumn/winter 2003. An industrial space in the suburbs of Paris was transformed into a rubble-strewn icy wasteland. A Perspex wind tunnel hovering high above it enclosed a model battling her way through a man-made blizzard. She was wearing a white kimono that billowed behind her as she struggled to walk, exposing her naked torso. Suffice to say that any buyers visiting the designer's showroom later on in the week might have been surprised to discover that this lovely garment was embroidered not with oriental blooms but with the scene of a particularly lurid orgy. Alexander McQueen may now be owned by Gucci and, as such, is about as much a part of the couture establishment as can be, but he remains fashion's most powerful agent provocateur.

He grew up in London's East End, the youngest of six children, and attended Rokeby, the local all-boys comprehensive where, despite the brute maleness of the 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, and to escape the often unsettled nature of family life, the young McQueen passed the time bird-watching from the roof of the tower block where he lived. Ornithology remains an obsession to this day.

McQueen uses his middle name rather than his first name – Lee – because he was signing on when he started out and "didn't want to walk into the dole office and be recognised because I'd been in the Sunday papers". His father is a cab driver, his mother a genealogist. Their son was employed first as an apprentice at Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard, then, after two years, neighbouring Gieves & Hawkes. However extreme his work today might be, it is executed with the precision of bespoke menswear.

From Savile Row, McQueen moved to Angels & Bermans, theatrical costumiers, then, after a brief stint with avant-garde designer Koji Tatsuno and aged only 20, to Milan and a position at Romeo Gigli, then at the height of his fame.

It is from Gigli, McQueen says, 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 all that hype in the first place?"

In 1990, back in London after a year, McQueen went for an interview at the fashion school, Central Saint Martins. "He came for a job teaching pattern cutting," Bobbie Hillson, founder-director of the postgraduate fashion course, said at the time. "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 still only 21!" Hillson offered him a place studying at the college instead.

His degree collection was bought in its entirety by the stylist Isabella Blow who as patron, muse and unofficial PR set about promoting McQueen as the Next Big Thing. The media didn't need much encouragement: here was the East End boy made good and one who seemed more than happy to resort to shock tactics to boot. McQueen obligingly told the press that, while at Gieves & Hawkes, he had written "I am a cunt" in the lining of a jacket destined for the Prince of Wales.

"The press started all that, not me," he has since said. "But I played on it. It's the Pygmalion syndrome." Imagine the furore, then, when after producing only eight collections, McQueen was offered a job as design director of the Parisian couture house of Givenchy which, famously, had Audrey Hepburn as its muse. McQueen surprised any detractors by rising to the challenge with considerable aplomb. His four-year tenure at the house was by no means easy – he made no secret of the fact that he was extremely unhappy there. However, even the resolutely bourgeois French fashion establishment had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that this was a man with a talent to be reckoned with.

Givenchy is owned by the French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH which also owns Christian Dior, Christian Lacroix and Louis Vuitton among others. Its arch-rival is the Italian giant, the Gucci Group. In 2000, Gucci bought a 51 per cent stake in McQueen's company for an undisclosed sum rumoured to be in excess of $20m. Its intention was clear: enfant terrible no longer, he was to become a lucrative international brand in his own right. A McQueen store has since opened in New York, a second opens in London later this month. The designer's first fragrance is launched tomorrow – his 34th birthday.

But McQueen has lost none of his raw energy, as long-time collaborator, the photographer Nick Knight, testifies. Knight recently filmed the designer transforming a male model in white Yohji Yamamoto trouser suit into a bride for his internet site showstudio.com.

"You know," Knight says, "you hear all these stories about how the women in the Givenchy atelier were terrified when he got his scissors out, about how he hacks and cuts and slashes. So he cuts the suit up, pulls pieces down, gaffer tapes up the middle. Then he makes a train with the cloth. Then he gets white paint and throws it at the bottom half of the model and, with his hands, starts shaping it, moving the paint down the cloth. He's doing all this to incredibly loud techno music, sweating and slipping about in the paint, and so focused, other-worldy. Finally he puts a veil on him, ties his hands together and stuffs a tie into his mouth. There was a great sadness to it, I thought. I don't know how much of it was about Lee. But, by the end, this very handsome young man has been turned into a bride."

Alexander McQueen's position may appear today to have changed immeasurably. He counts many of the world's most famous celebrities as clients and mixes in moneyed circles. It's worth noting, however, that his closest friends and colleagues have been with him from the start and remain unflinchingly loyal. This is not surprising. There's a restlessness at the heart of this man that keeps him in the vanguard of culture, and all while he forges ahead to become one of the great fashion success stories.

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