Lee Alexander McQueen (17 March 1969 – 11 February 2010) was once a British type fashion designer who based Alexander McQueen model in 1992, additionally being a major fashion designer at Givenchy from 1996 to 2001. Alexander was once the youngest of the six kids of his oldsters, Ronald and Joyce McQueen. His father was once a taxi driving force, and his mom labored as a social science trainer.
Leaving college at 16, McQueen started his profession as an apprentice at Anderson & Sheppard, then stitching males’s fits at Savile Row, together with the swimsuit for Prince Charles himself. They are saying that the trend fashion designer left an obscene inscription with a marker at the lining of Prince Charles’s jacket.
In 1991 the fashion designer graduated from Central Saint Martins Faculty of Artwork and Design in London. His commencement paintings was once a clothes assortment referred to as “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Sufferers”, which right away attracted consideration and turned into a step forward and an enormous luck within the eyes of the world press.
In a unfastened ingenious surroundings, the potential for McQueen was once unleashed: clothes with blood crimson prints and skulls, Victorian technology garments, and loopy antics like the only when McQueen began stitching his personal locks of hair into the liner of his garments in a different plastic envelope. In his 1995 interview with probably the most type magazines, McQueen defined that he was once impressed so as to add hair to the liner by way of Victorian prostitutes who offered curls as souvenirs.
Within the spring of 2001, one of the crucial well-known and dramatic collections of McQueen got here out below the title “VOSS”. On the runway display, there was once a large glass dice within the middle of a room having a look like a ward of a psychiatric hospital. The partitions of of the dice weren’t illuminated from the interior, so the target audience may best see their very own reflections.
No movements came about for approximately an hour, and McQueen has been looking at the target audience which diligently seemed clear of the dice, in order no longer to take a look at themselves. The fashion designer referred to as this trick an try to “deploy the trend trade against other folks”. In the end, fashions seemed at the catwalk, dressed in feathers, shells and having bandaged heads. The apogee of the trend display got here when the sunshine became on within the dice. The glass partitions shattered to the edges, crashing at the ground. There was once a unadorned girl within the dice, mendacity on a sofa and dressed in a fuel masks. Moths had been flying round. Newshounds referred to as this assortment as “the most productive paintings of a manner theater”.
McQueen understood that the essence of an individual is characterised by way of a scent, so in 2003 he launched the first feminine fragrance referred to as “Kingdom”. The fashion designer sought after the fragrance to start out frivolously, then transform intense, virtually masculine notes, evoking an enormous intercourse pressure. McQueen dreamed that the perfume would change into an everlasting vintage, unaffected by way of type and tendencies. A yr later, a males’s model of the fragrance was once launched.
In 2006, Alexander created a sub-brand referred to as “McQ”, focused on a tender technology of dynamic women and men. The fad area remains to be functioning these days, having in its collections no longer best garments, but in addition sneakers, luggage, scarves and shades.
In Might of 2007, McQueen entered a gloomy length of his existence, following the suicide of Isabella Blow, the icon of a manner journalism and his longtime good friend. It took Alexander some time to recuperate from the surprise. A triumphant go back to the catwalk came about within the fall of 2009 at Paris Style Week, the place McQueen offered a brand new assortment. As all the time, the eccentric assortment attracted numerous consideration, and the trend fashion designer was once accused of misogyny — supposedly thickly painted crimson lips made the fashions seem like intercourse dolls.
McQueen’s ultimate assortment referred to as “Plato’s Atlantis” was once offered in 2010 within the type of a post-apocalyptic myth. This assortment integrated Armadillo sneakers with their 30 cm heels.
Alexander McQueen was once overtly homosexual. The fad fashion designer discovered his non-traditional sexual orientation on the age of 6. In 2000, George Forsyth, a documentary filmmaker, entered McQueen’s non-public existence. Their formal wedding ceremony came about on a yacht in Ibiza, as same-sex marriage in Spain was once legalized best by way of 2005.
After the suicide of Isabella Blow, McQueen’s psychological well being failed and he was once identified with a depressive dysfunction. Medicine didn’t enhance his situation both: in Might and July 2009, the trend fashion designer was once stored from an overdose. The remaining straw for McQueen was once February 2 of 2010, when his mom Joyce died after a protracted fight with most cancers. At the morning of February 11, the housekeeper discovered Alexander McQueen hanged in his own residence in London. He left a observe: “Take care of my canines, sorry, I like you, Lee.” Later it became out that McQueen bequeathed £50,000 for the splendid lifetime of his pets.
Sarah Burton, who was once McQueen’s deputy for 14 years, turned into the ingenious director for the Alexander McQueen model after his demise. The corporate persevered to enlarge globally within the following years, and its product vary additionally expanded.