Designed for Destruction
For a time, starting in the early 1990s, Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen were inseparable—fashion muse and master—lovers without the sex. They shared something else: a self-loathing so intense it would devour them both, with Blow's suicide in 2007 and McQueen's in 2010. In an adaptation from her new book, Champagne Supernovas, Maureen Callahan reveals how two great British talents lost the battle of their lives.
Photograph by David LaChapelle.
Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow, photographed by David LaChapelle for Vanity Fair's March 1997 issue, at Hedingham Castle, England.From the beginning of his career, in 1992, Alexander McQueen defined himself as a designer who trafficked in raunch, filth, and perversion so heightened it was almost funny. He was an outsider, and he reveled in it, but only three years later, he was losing himself.
He had just shown his autumn-winter 1995–96 collection, "Highland Rape," and it was his breakout: his models stormed the runway with bare breasts, wearing slashed tartan and lace and punk-rock rubber pants. It made McQueen a star, and now he wanted to fit in with the fashion people he'd once ridiculed: he'd already had his teeth fixed, and would later have liposuction on his stomach and lose the wattle under his chin.
He took to life at Hilles, Isabella and Detmar Blow's country pile, and Issie (as she was always known to close friends), a blue-blooded star-maker who'd discovered McQueen when he was just a student, made sure falcons were on hand for her bird-obsessed protégé. His friends found it all so pretentious: Lee McQueen, the cabdriver's son, trying to inhabit the grandeur of his new, more fashionable first name—actually, it was his middle name, and it was Issie who suggested he adopt it. Far more regal, she said.
He agreed.
His old friends, who still called him Lee, knew McQueen would soon be gone. "I remember him telling me that someone at British Vogue said that we should split up," says his then boyfriend, Andrew Groves. "That it would be better for his career."
McQueen was happiest in Soho's gay bars, hanging out with prostitutes. He'd also begun spending time in New York, crashing with his friend the fashion designer Miguel Adrover. They'd hit clubs in the Meatpacking District, or go to Bowery Bar, where they'd sometimes see Marc Jacobs, then collapse in Adrover's basement apartment in the East Village.
Back in the U.K., the decadence continued. He was on his way to becoming the kind of fashion person that he loathed—demanding, materialistic, status-obsessed. McQueen also told Detmar and Issie how he liked to be degraded, how one partner made him have sex with another man while he watched—that he didn't like it but that it played into his sense of victimization.
"He was very attracted to people being abused," says Detmar Blow. When he was younger, there was much about Lee McQueen that was buoyant and light, sensitive and caring. Now those aspects were receding.
According to McQueen's old friend Chris Bird, after Issie confided her inability to conceive, McQueen, who could be willfully cruel to those he cared for most, later turned to Detmar and said, "I've heard you've been shooting blanks." He'd see her shuffling his way in tears, undone by her latest crisis, and say, "Here comes mad old Issie."
"Lee wasn't the nicest person to her, but she loved his genius," says designer Julien Macdonald, another Issie discovery. "He was so crazy. One minute he'd be a wonderful person, and the next he'd be telling people to piss off."
Many of McQueen's friends suspected he was bipolar; over the years, Issie would also struggle with the disorder.
"The signs were there all along," Groves says, but the highs and lows were easily blamed on the mad rush to complete collections. Alice Smith, his first publicist and longtime friend, also thought McQueen might be bipolar. "He was extremely vivacious sometimes, and others he could hardly speak." She recalls seeing him and Issie at a Central Saint Martins fashion show sometime after "Highland Rape," side by side in the front row, staring into space. Smith went over to say hi, and McQueen, in sunglasses, ignored her.
"I remember thinking, My God, what's happened to him?"
After "Highland Rape," everything Lee McQueen had been working toward became real. He was named Designer of the Year by the British Fashion Council. He had the most prestigious slot at London Fashion Week, showing last. Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy was circling.
LVMH was formed in 1987 when the fashion and champagne companies merged. Bernard Arnault, the C.E.O., was most interested in expanding the new company's fashion holdings and reviving its mustiest houses. By 1996, Arnault was considering Alexander McQueen for Givenchy.
McQueen was breaking a little under the stress. He was seeking relief in hard drugs and anonymous sex and had lost many of his old friends.
After her last encounter with McQueen, Alice Smith was surprised when he invited her to a gathering. "Come to my party … loads of Charlie," the invite read. Smith showed up, and the stylist Katie Grand was there, but hardly anyone else, maybe 15 people in the socialite Annabelle Neilson's cavernous Notting Hill flat. McQueen was doing coke in the bathroom; when he was out in the living room, everyone was dancing strenuously, trying way too hard to have fun. He couldn't hide his disgust.
"I remember going up to him and saying, 'Are you all right?' " Smith says. "And he said, 'I'm fine, I'm fine.' . . . He just got black moods, and he couldn't shake them off."
The same was true of Isabella. She'd been at loose ends since the fall of 1994, when British Vogue sidelined her: she was far too mercurial and extravagant, having run up the budget on one shoot to nearly $130,000. "She would say, 'I'm so unhappy. I'm so unhappy,' " Plum Sykes, her former assistant, told New York magazine. "And I'd say, 'But what about Detmar? What about this fabulous thousand-acre estate? What about your gorgeous flat in town?' And she'd say, 'But, Plum, I haven't got a child.' "
To the fashion press, Issie and McQueen still presented themselves as inseparable, the muse and the mastermind. And McQueen did love her. She was his most articulate ambassador, explaining his point of view as he never could. "What attracted me to Alexander," she told Harper's Bazaar in 1996, "was the way he takes ideas from the past and sabotages them with his cut to make them thoroughly new. . . . He is like a Peeping Tom in the way he slits and stabs at fabric to explore all the erogenous zones of the body."
It was similar to the way they described themselves: lovers without the sex. "Dante," the show he staged in a church in Spitalfields, would be dedicated to her.
McQueen wanted the job at Givenchy and declared himself a convert to luxury. "I think people want that now," he said. "They don't want to look as though they bought all their clothes in a thrift shop."
With "Dante," McQueen used masks that referenced the religious iconography of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, sheathing his models in military coats and corsetry, their pallid faces slashed with crimson lipstick. Writing in The New York Times, Amy Spindler described "Dante" as a combination of "Blueblood and hot blood." McQueen, she said, "brought the excitement, edge and theatrics he is known for but added a wonderful fourth element for the first time: maturity."
"Fashion Is a Vampiric Thing"
On October 14, 1996, LVMH announced that Alexander McQueen, now 27 years old, was taking over as head designer at Givenchy. His appointment left founder Hubert de Givenchy disconsolate. "I find it a total disaster, and I suffer," he said, "but what can I do?"
When McQueen took the job at Givenchy, Isabella assumed that she'd be named the house muse, that McQueen would put her on salary. He gave her nothing. She was heartbroken.
"She gave Lee everything," says Julien Macdonald. "All her money, all her time, all her energy. She introduced him to everybody. And then, when he went to Givenchy and he had money, he told her to piss off. He had millions, she was penniless, and he gave her nothing. He just shut the door."
"The role of a muse is changing," she said. "If Alexander uses some of my ideas in his show, and he has, I don't get paid; he does."
McQueen was furious. His great baseline fear was that everyone he knew, except his mother, was using him. Issie would ask, "Do you remember the good old days? You knocked me up"—the most poignant metaphor a childless fashionista could conjure. And McQueen would say, "That world is gone, Issie."
For someone who would soon sit down with Charlie Rose and declare, "Fashion people are not that intelligent," McQueen had no problem adapting. He was running around with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Bella Freud, and Elton John. He hated taking the Eurostar, so LVMH often flew him and his team back and forth—commercial, not private. They gave him a driver and an apartment in Paris, which he shared with his crew. Though McQueen's office was quite small—at about 8 by 12 feet, it was the size of a walk-in closet—he seemed happy just to have one.
He set to work immediately; he had three months till his debut at Givenchy, which had become a fashion-world fixation. Was this hellion capable of going commercial?
McQueen's debut won mixed reviews. He "left his audience cold and confused with his first show for Givenchy," wrote Amy Spindler in The New York Times. But Heath Brown in The Times was laudatory: "The gamble has paid off," he wrote. "McQueen pushed the boundaries of fashion to its limits."
After that first show, Lee McQueen was gone. He was Alexander now, the imperial genius.
"Givenchy was the point where Lee started to change, on many levels," says Simon Costin, his then set designer. "The stress involved in doing prêt-à-porter, couture, and his own label was pretty horrendous." Costin, like others before him, began to suspect McQueen was bipolar. "He was up and down a lot more, harder to work with," Costin says. "The people who perhaps answered back or said 'Don't be ridiculous' would disappear."
When Kate Betts interviewed McQueen for an American Vogue profile, he lit into her. The headline subsequently asked, "Does Alexander McQueen have enough talent to keep Givenchy going?" Betts wrote that his latest collection was "almost revolting." He was in the throes of a persecution complex.
"It's like Hitler and the Holocaust," McQueen told Newsweek. "He destroyed millions of people because he didn't understand. That's what a lot of people have done to me, because they can't understand what I do."
Feeling abandoned by McQueen, Issie found a new protégé, American designer Jeremy Scott. It was like taunting an old lover with a new one, and Scott implied that McQueen was threatened: "Isabella told me he threw an ashtray at her and said he wanted to kill me," Scott said. "But I don't know that I believe it. She was always talking about other people and how they did her wrong." He was 24 years old, as brash as McQueen, his top row of teeth encased in a gold grill that spelled J-E-R-E-M-Y. The fashion press loved him.
In 1997, The Independent ran a profile of Scott called "Move Over McQueen—Here Comes the Kansas Ranger." Scott was perfect for Issie at the moment, and her artful feints, the idea she'd love another designer as much, if not more, kept McQueen coming around. He still lent her some pieces, which she found a pathetic metaphor for their relationship. "He likes to use the clothes as power over me," she would later say, but from McQueen's perspective, Issie had become a bottomless pit of need: there was no satisfying her, and she was self-destructing.
"She'd made some pretty rash and not great decisions about her own career," says Chris Bird. "She'd gone on holidays and not returned. She wasn't turning up for work and getting fired and she puts her hope on Lee. . . . His instinct was 'I want to be my own person. I worked bloody hard for this.' "
The milliner Philip Treacy, another Issie discovery, was worried, too: more and more she wanted hats that covered her face. She was never a beauty, but she had style and joie de vivre; now she was suddenly looking very old and tired, with huge bags under her eyes. McQueen suggested plastic surgery. Instead, she went to Philip for hats and gave the press a tortured explanation: "Fashion is a vampiric thing," she said. "That's why I wear the hats, to keep everyone away from me. They say, 'Oh, can I kiss you?' I say, 'No, thank you very much. That's why I've worn the hat. Goodbye.' I don't want to be kissed by all and sundry."
Issie and McQueen: here were two of the fashion industry's most influential, beset by so much self-loathing amid so much beauty that they were alienating friends and colleagues, sabotaging themselves, and, in the designer's case, degrading himself. McQueen told Detmar that he needed to be abused sexually: "Detmar, that's the way I want it."
"I think the way he tried to metabolize [his pain] was by having sex," says Bird. "His personal relationships were very volatile."
For all their dysfunction, Issie had always kept the door open for him at Hilles: there, McQueen could do what he liked with whomever he liked, and it would stay behind those walls. When it came to that, Issie would never judge.
"Can Everybody Not Give Lee Any Drugs?"
In 1997, for the second time in two years, the British Fashion Council named McQueen Designer of the Year (an honor he shared with John Galliano). No number of accolades could sway his detractors: "His only usefulness," Vivienne Westwood said later, "is as a measure of zero talent." Yves Saint Laurent called him a "talentless upstart."
As it turned out, McQueen hated France. He could barely speak the language. He was under pressure to turn a profit.
"The couture collections were amazing," says Macdonald, who succeeded McQueen at Givenchy. "The ready-to-wear—nobody bought the clothes. If you looked at the figures, it was a disaster."
Behind closed doors, McQueen's crudeness was calcifying. A boyfriend had recently tried to commit suicide, and McQueen's reaction, Bird says, was alarming: "Lee said, 'How dare he try to kill himself in my fucking house?' "
McQueen was now constantly on coke, even asking Eric Lanuit, then head press officer at Givenchy, for help.
"He would call to ask for certain 'vitamin substances,' " Lanuit said in the documentary McQueen & I. "I'm not talking about vitamin C, I'm talking about cocaine." McQueen also took up cigarettes, which shocked even him. "I never smoked in my life until I started at Givenchy," he said. He consumed as much as Kate Moss and Marc Jacobs, two packs a day.
"It was like, 'Can everybody not give Lee any drugs?' " Macdonald says. "He was completely off his head. He was, like, taking coke, taking E—he was just uncontrollable. In a mad way, in a state, I think. The stories you used to find out. . . . Oh God, that guy really needed help."
McQueen, in the depths of self-pity, became obsessed with physical impairments and disability. This became the theme for yet another breakthrough, his spring-summer 1999 show, "No. 13."
The Paralympian Aimee Mullins, a double amputee, walked in wooden prosthetics. For the finale, Shalom Harlow stood on a rotating platform, swirling in white as two robot arms splattered her with spray paint.
"The triumph of London's fashion week," Suzy Menkes wrote. "McQueen captured the raw aggression of Britpop and the swaggering showmanship of the art scene." McQueen agreed. "It was my best show," he would say, "that moment with Shalom!" He later said he was so moved that he wept.
As usual, McQueen was working out his own demons on the runway, and "No. 13" was a plain depiction of how he saw himself: hobbled, disabled, a puppet on a pedestal vandalized by automatons.
"Anger in my work reflected angst in my personal life," he would later tell Menkes.
He wanted out of Givenchy. He'd lost weight, dyed his hair, and rolled with rock stars and royalty, yet he was sure that the fashion elite were mocking him, the fat East Ender who thought he was good enough for French couture.
McQueen went to the press: "Fire me!" he said.
Gucci made him an offer: for a 51 percent stake, McQueen would only have to produce for his own house. The one caveat: McQueen had to make clothes that would sell. In late 2000 he officially announced his defection to Gucci Group.
"Talk about bite the hand that feeds you," McQueen said. "I bloody chewed it up and spat it out."
"The Loneliest Place on the Planet"
While he seemed to be stabilizing professionally, McQueen was a wreck in his personal life. He'd met a new man, George Forsyth, who, at 22, was several years younger than McQueen and had never been exposed to the fashion industry. He was saddened by what he saw. "The fashion world is the loneliest place on the face of the planet," Forsyth told The Mail on Sunday. "It's a shallow world full of party people and party 'friends.' Lee knew that."
His escalating mood swings were shrugged off as a genius's eccentricity: There was the night McQueen took Forsyth to drinks in Paris, dinner in Spain, then dancing in Amsterdam. There was the lounging at home, watching a documentary on Africa, with McQueen deciding that should be their next trip—and there they were, on a plane 48 hours later. Two days more and they were over it, calling Naomi Campbell to meet up for New Year's. McQueen and Forsyth "spent three days partying and taking drugs," Forsyth said. "Naomi didn't do any coke even though she was surrounded by people who were."
Issie was furious that McQueen was throwing away money while paying her nothing, but she was more upset by his drug use. "This boy she loved—this is her creative genius, and what is he doing?," Detmar says. "He's shoveling it; he's destroying himself."
McQueen and Forsyth were usually partying with Kate Moss, Sadie Frost, Annabelle Neilson, and the heiress Davinia Taylor.
"It was a very incestuous, cliquey world," said Forsyth in The Mail on Sunday. "They were hard-core—staying up for days, either drinking or taking drugs, in some cases both. . . . People had a lot of money so they never had to stop."
The two had been dating for about six months when McQueen asked Forsyth to marry him. They wanted a small ceremony, but Kate and Annabelle took over, delivering them to a massive yacht stocked with something like $30,000 worth of champagne. In attendance were many of Kate's friends: Sadie Frost and Jude Law; Noel Gallagher's then wife, Meg Mathews; and actress Patsy Kensit. The priest barely spoke English. The whole thing seemed less like a wedding than another excuse to party.
"Everyone was eating and drinking and taking drugs," Forsyth said. "There were no family. It was all party people.… In the fashion world there were very few people who said, 'There's someone who needs looking after.' "
Isabella would have gladly done so, had she been welcome. She was spending increasing amounts of time in Paris, renting McQueen's old apartment in the Marais. By the end of 2002, she and Detmar had separated.
For months Issie had been sliding into a deep, intractable depression—trying antidepressants to no avail, talking openly about suicide. She had drawn up a will, which—according to a New Yorker profile around that time—included provisions for her head to be severed and sent to her father's estate, and her heart to be mailed to Detmar.
"You know how hard it is to live with someone who's trying to commit suicide all the time?" Detmar says. "It's really fucking hard."
Issie took comfort in the small things. Tom Ford gave her a V.I.P. taxi pass to use in Paris; she slept in a bed once owned by Freddie Mercury; she was still a front-row presence nonpareil. For the opening of "When Philip Met Isabella," a 2002 exhibition of Treacy's work for his mentor, Isabella wore an enormous, semi-translucent red disk on her head.
But nothing and no one was as important as McQueen, and when he took Tom Ford up on his offer to join Gucci Group, Issie allowed herself to think that maybe now he'd pay her back somehow. He didn't. She was so bitter she told Detmar that "when she's dying it's not [in] a McQueen."
"Paris for Couture, London for Suits, America for Psychiatric Hospitals"
For his spring-summer 2001 show, "Voss," McQueen staggered the terror—deliberately starting an hour late, forcing his audience to sit around an enormous reflective Perspex box. What better revenge than to make all these horrible fashion people compare their looks, maybe find themselves, as McQueen had, falling so short?
"I was looking at it on the monitor, watching everyone trying not to look at themselves," McQueen said. It was his greatest retribution.
And then, suddenly, the lights went off, and the giant box was lit from within, his models—who couldn't see out—going crazy against the glass, sheathed in white caps, some with stuffed birds framing their faces. The show closed with the collapse of a box within the box, revealing a naked model, flesh spilling over, her head encased in a demonic gray mask. She was hooked up to a breathing tube and covered in moths, the tableau a replica of Joel-Peter Witkin's Sanitarium.
The Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times all raved.
"Up until Mr. McQueen's glorious crack-up, there was no discernable reason to get out of bed for the London shows," said The New York Times's Cathy Horyn, who went on to call McQueen "a great designer who is not only making beautiful clothes, but also responding, like an artist, to the horror and insanity in contemporary culture."
McQueen was also working through personal traumas. His relationship with George didn't last long.
Though still estranged from Issie, McQueen was hearing things. Her bare breasts spilled out of her top during lunch with a Prada exec, yet she continued the conversation as if nothing happened. Her underwear came untied at a couture show, so she stepped out of it and kept going. She introduced the Duchess of York to a photographer by saying, "This is Donald. He has an enormous cock."
In the summer of 2003, Issie sought treatment at London's Priory, the fashion world's mental-health clinic of choice; Kate Moss went there for rehab in 1998. Issie had no money, and McQueen pitched in more than $8,000. Her doctors put her on lithium, and when she was released, in September, she was nearly catatonic. She began electroshock treatments, which only seemed to speed up the cycling of her mania and depression.
Detmar, who had never really left Isabella, tried to persuade her to go to the United States after he had had a conversation with Andrew Solomon, who'd written The Noonday Demon about his own battles with depression.
"He said to me, 'Detmar, Paris for couture, London for suits, but America for psychiatric hospitals.' " But Issie didn't want to leave: London was where her friends and family were, and she never lost hope that McQueen would come back to her.
As Issie decompensated, different doctors were called upon, different drugs tried, electroshock therapy resumed, yet nothing worked. She tried to kill herself at least three times in three months: overdosing on pills, wrecking a car, and eventually throwing herself off an overpass known as Suicide Bridge, smashing both ankles. She was told she'd never wear heels again.
She was institutionalized and placed under the care of Dr. Stephen Pereira, who would also treat McQueen for mixed anxiety and depressive disorder. Issie was now going so far as to burn her vagina with lit cigarettes, a literal form of self-abuse for someone who couldn't have the babies she so badly wanted.
"Everybody knows I've fucked up," she'd say.
On May 5, 2007, Issie guzzled weed killer, the same way Detmar's father had committed suicide 30 years earlier. She was rushed to the hospital, where she grew irritated that the nurses didn't recognize her: "Google me!"
When her doctors told her she'd be dead within weeks, she was relieved; she'd told her sister Lavinia, "I'm worried that I haven't taken enough." She'd ingested as much as 20 times the amount needed to kill her.
When they heard Issie was dying, those closest to her, including Philip Treacy, came to see her. McQueen was not among them.
On August 6, 2011, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art took the unprecedented step of remaining open until midnight: such was the response to "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" that people lined up for hours, snaking down Fifth Avenue on the exhibition's final two days. It brought in an estimated $15 million over three months and became the eighth-most-popular show in the museum's history.
Left unsaid was a brutal truth: "Savage Beauty" would never have been mounted had Alexander McQueen not been found dead the year before, at age 40, on February 11, 2010, just a few weeks before his next show in Paris.
The industry had long since come to regard McQueen as an endless generator of fantastical ideas, the sustained quality of his output having long ceased to amaze. Yet he was the first fashion designer whose death felt like a larger cultural, generational loss, on the level of Kurt Cobain's suicide or the accidental deaths of River Phoenix and Heath Ledger: these were originals all.
In the years before his suicide, McQueen, in his way, tried to make amends, showing up at a Christmas party thrown by Simon Costin. He saw his old friend Chris Bird, and in a rare moment of vulnerability revealed that he was H.I.V.-positive. "I just sort of said to him, 'Well, that was bloody stupid, wasn't it?' And he just said, 'Yeah.' "
Most everyone who knew Lee is convinced that his suicide was a rash impulse brought on by darkness and drugs, by the recent death of his beloved mother, but as Dr. Pereira testified at the inquest, McQueen had tried to kill himself twice before, in 2009. He had felt isolated by fame, let down by people he loved, existentially depressed after the triumph of a show, a failure in every way except professionally. His mother's death, his psychiatrist said, left him feeling that "there was very little to live for."
On February 10, two days before his mother's funeral, McQueen did an Internet search: "When someone slits their wrist how long does it take for them to die?" He did enough coke to kill himself three or four times over, swallowed some sleeping pills, then took his dressing-gown cord and tried to hang himself in the shower. He failed. He grabbed a cleaver and another knife, then went into his closet. He looped his favorite brown belt around his neck, slashed his wrists, and hung himself, leaving behind a note that read in part:
Please look after my dogs. Sorry, I love you. Lee.
PS Bury me at the church.
In his flat, in pride of place, were two portraits of Issie by Steven Meisel. "It was the most valuable thing I learned in fashion, her death," McQueen told The New York Times in 2009, months after his own two failed suicide attempts. "Isabella was so strong in her public image but couldn't stand her ground in her personal life. I know the other side. She would say that fashion killed her, but she also allowed that to happen in a lot of ways."
Adapted from Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen and the 90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion by Maureen Callahan to be published this month by Touchstone, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.; © 2014 by the author.
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