The Great Fashion Designers (47 page)

Gucci led the way in the true globalisation of luxury and pioneered the broadening of its customer base. As rising income levels around the world brought designer style within the reach of millions more people, designer labels were booming. They were now mass luxury brands, even if many of their customers reserved their spending for the fragrances and accessories rather than the clothes. Even the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York in 2001 appeared to have little effect on business: on the day of the attacks, the New York store of YSL received forty-two calls from women wanting the peasant blouse, Ford meticulously noted. The growth of the luxury sector led to a period of consolidation as leading luxury businesses sought to buy up brands with global potential. As part of this process, Gucci was itself the object of a titanic struggle for control between Bernard Arnault's LVMH and François-Pinault's Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), ending in the law courts in Amsterdam. PPR won out in 2000, to Ford's approval. Four years later, however, PPR's efforts to exert greater managerial control over Gucci Group led to Ford's downfall.

The departure of both Ford and De Sole in 2004 was abrupt. Although the full details of the fallout are still unclear to this day, PPR executives clearly thought the spotlight of attention was too firmly focused on the personality of Ford himself. The designer was devastated by the outcome. ‘I was depressed. I wallowed in self-pity,' he admitted in an interview. Ford expressed interest in developing a career in Hollywood, but this has not so far got off the ground. After more than a year of trying to determine what was best for the future, he launched his own label in 2007, initially focusing on menswear and sold only through a single Tom Ford store at 845 Madison Avenue in New York.

In 2008, the concept was rolled out worldwide through link-ups with leading designer retailers, such as Lane Crawford in Hong Kong. Ford believes there is a genuine gap in luxury menswear. ‘Giorgio Armani and Ralph [Lauren] have both dominated but they are both 74 years old,' he said. ‘and who is behind them?'

For charisma alone, Ford could arguably claim a place among the world's great designers. ‘This job is a total ego thing in a way,' he acknowledged, reviving the concept of designer as style dictator. ‘To be a designer and say, “This is the way people should dress, this is the way their homes should look, this is the way the world should be.” ‘

Further reading:
Tom Ford produced an outstanding summary of his own career in a collaboration with writer Brigid Foley:
Tom Ford
(2004) features an extended interview with the designer and strong visual coverage of the highlights of his years at Gucci.

British fashion has produced countless young designers full of loudmouthed attitude and shock-tactics clothes. Many of them have sparkled briefly, like fireworks, only to fall swiftly to earth. However, Alexander McQueen, who could always out-swear his contemporaries and enjoyed creating a furore on the catwalk, has proved a designer with staying power. He is an enduring talent who looks certain to be a major influence in fashion for many years to come. This did not seem so likely back in 1996 when the young designer upset the Parisian fashion establishment after landing the job of head designer at Givenchy. McQueen swiftly alienated the French by making no attempt to speak French, deriding the still-revered Hubert de Givenchy as ‘irrelevant', and producing a shockingly ill-judged first collection that even he admitted was ‘crap'. In retrospect, the Givenchy experience, which lasted for four years, represented a huge learning curve for the designer.

By late 2000—shortly before leaving Givenchy to the relief of both parties—McQueen appeared to have secured his long-term future by selling 51 per cent of his own label to Gucci Group. In creative terms, the designer was also reinvigorated, producing inspired collections season after season presented through some of the most memorable fashion shows of modern times. At the heart of his collections is superbly constructed tailoring, cut with confidence and elan, skills which are applied to playing with the shape of the body. His best work has a certain toughness about it—he has described his clothes as ‘armour'—worn by women who want to look powerful. As he has put it: ‘It kind of fends people off. You have to have a lot of balls to talk to a woman wearing my clothes.'

McQueen's work is also shot through with autobiographical influences, a characteristic acknowledged by the designer many times. To take just one specific event from his own life: as an eight-year-old he witnessed one of his sisters being beaten up by her husband, a traumatic event that he says had a profound impact on his attitude to women and to his design. He has joked that he is the fashion industry's therapist. Certainly, fashion shows with a disturbing undercurrent have been a feature of his career, ranging from collections based on Hitchcock heroines, the cult film
Picnic at Hanging Rock
, the William Golding novel
Lord of the Flies
and asylums. ‘My own living nightmares,' is how he has described his presentations. Death and decay are McQueen preoccupations, summed up by a dress made from decaying flowers that featured in his autumn 2007 collection. ‘I just use things that people want to hide in their head,' he said in 2002. ‘Things about war, religion, sex, things that we all think about but don't bring to the forefront. But I do, and force them to watch it.'

But while darkness is often dominant, romance is an equally integral feature of the McQueen vision of the world, as his long-term stylist and friend Katy England has noted. ‘We all carry both the dark and the light with us,' he said in 2008. ‘I don't see why it shouldn't be reflected in my work.' He often sees beauty in the apparently ugly, with an aesthetic sense that chimes with contemporary British artists such as Jake and Dinos Chapman or Damien Hirst. ‘I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists,' he said in 2007. ‘I have to force people to look at things.'

Lee Alexander McQueen, born in 1969, was the youngest of the six children of an East London cab driver, an unlikely background that media reports turned into the fairy tale story of an East End rough lad made good. The designer, who rightly grew to hate the stereotyping, did not serve his own cause well by joking that he was ‘a big-mouth East London yob'. The real story of McQueen's rise was more prosaic, founded on a childhood obsession with drawing fashion (he claims to have begun as early as three) and a capacity for working hard. His mother, a genealogist, encouraged him to apply for work in Savile Row in 1986 after he had left school with just two qualifications, both in art. Savile Row was no longer the force it had once been in men's tailoring, but McQueen was fortunate to land his first job at Anderson & Sheppard, perhaps the most demanding and perfectionist of the remaining tailors on the Row. After two years learning how to cut and make trousers, he moved to Gieves & Hawkes, where he focused on jackets. It was an extraordinary learning experience that gave him a technical expertise well beyond any of his contemporaries—and all before he had turned twenty.

After Savile Row, McQueen worked briefly at Bermans & Nathans, the theatrical costumiers, and for the designer Koji Tatsuno. He then landed a job with Romeo Gigli by buying a one-way plane ticket to Milan and presenting his portfolio. A year on, when Gigli's business was under pressure, McQueen returned to London and undertook a postgraduate fashion degree at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. His degree collection was bought by the eccentric talent-spotter Isabella Blow (1958–2007), then a fashion editor at
Vogue
, who promptly made it her mission to bring the name Alexander McQueen (Lee had been dropped) to the attention of the wider world. McQueen's early collections drew mixed reviews, including accusations of misogyny, which the designer fiercely rejected, blaming fashion editors' misinterpretations. An early collection, titled Highland Rape (from 1995, reprised and developed in his autumn / winter 2006 collection), was not intended as a tasteless reference to the act of rape, but was a reference to the English slaughter of the Scottish clans in the eighteenth century. The models wore ripped and shredded clothes mostly pieced together by McQueen himself from fabric shop remnants. A later show for Givenchy using fibreglass mannequins was not a rejection of real women but an exploration of a blank canvas as a more objective means of viewing a new collection. McQueen's early creation of bumsters (trousers cut so low that the cleft of the buttocks was revealed) also did not endear him to some of his female critics, although it was intended as an experiment in lengthening the torso—and was a harbinger of a low-rise jeans trend in the broader fashion market.

Working and living out of a studio in Hoxton, East London, McQueen built his label steadily although finances were always tight, as they were (and still are) for most young British designers. In 1996, the opportunity to take the helm at Givenchy, despite having designed no more than eight collections under his own name, was too good to be missed. Givenchy, owned by the LVMH conglomerate, chose McQueen as a second young British designer in succession, following in the steps of John Galliano, provoking the suggestion among the Parisian fashion set that the venerable house of Givenchy had been turned into a nursery for new talent. Speaking in 2000, McQueen commented: ‘Maybe I was too young to take on Givenchy. But nobody in my position would have done any different. I had to accept it.' Years later, he was philosophical about the experience, acknowledging that he learned a lot from the atelier. His mistake, he said, was to try to be someone he isn't. ‘When I was in Paris I tried to mould in with this concept of couture and this hierarchy, but it's just not me. I can't play that game. I think it looks stupid when designers play these bourgeois characters. At the end of the day, I'm left with the real me. What you see is what you get.'

The acquisition of a majority stake in his own label by Gucci Group in 2000 did not mean the end of the pressure for McQueen. In 2004, when Gucci Group creative director Tom Ford and chief executive Domenico De Sole left the business they had dominated, McQueen found himself answering to a new chief executive, Robert Polet, who declared that all the smaller labels in the Gucci Group should break even within three years or expect to be sold. McQueen, who had sensibly nurtured his own label all through the Givenchy years (displaying an impressive business acumen, unusual for a British designer), tripled sales within three years and
achieved the Polet target by 2007 through a variety of new projects, including the McQ secondary line, menswear, accessories and footwear. A skull-print scarf was a particular hit, selling phenomenally and prompting a flood of street fashion copies. In 2009, McQueen also created a capsule collection for Target, a mainstream American retailer.

McQueen had also found a new personal equilibrium, becoming a Buddhist and marrying his long-term partner George Forsyth in 2000 (although that relationship has since ended). The designer appeared to have mellowed. In 2005, he commented: ‘For a long time I was looking for my perfect equilibrium, my mojo. And now I think I'm getting there: I've found my customer, my silhouette, my cut.' A year later, still aged only thirty-seven, he commented: ‘The more I mature, the less confrontational I become. I've softened a bit in my old age.' The death by suicide of his long-time supporter Isabella Blow in 2007 also spurred him on. ‘I found a new love for [designing] because she loved it and she found me because of what I was good at … It was a wake-up call.' McQueen subsequently went on a pilgrimage to India and the results fed into his next collection.

His fashion shows are artistic events, sharpened through McQueen's interest in historical references, shot through with spectacle, mystery, violence, tenderness and beauty. For his memorable spring 1999 collection, the model Shalom Harlow played the role of a dying swan while being spray-painted by robots. His spring/summer 2001 collection, titled Voss, was staged in a large mirrored box, on which audience and models could watch their own reflections. The provocative show ended with the naked appearance of fetish writer Michelle Olley wearing a fetishist's mask and covered in moths. Fashion historian Caroline Evans wrote: ‘In the staging of this show, McQueen oscillated between beauty and horror, turning conventional ideas of beauty upside down.'

Working with leading London stylist Katy England and film and special effects teams, McQueen has produced spellbinding fashion shows that tend to blow through his budgets but leave even veteran show attendees speechless. For his autumn / winter 2006 collection, staged in March 2006, he concluded with an apparently glass pyramid at the heart of which appeared a curl of white smoke that unfurled to reveal the shape of the model Kate Moss in a white ruffled dress. The vision, created through a hologram, danced and blurred and vanished—a moment of magic. His spring/summer 2009 show featured a video of a spiralling Earth and a runway surreally adorned with stuffed animals. McQueen explained he had been exploring the thoughts of Charles Darwin and the effects of industrialisation on nature.