DIY practices in 1990s fashion: Notes from Alexander McQueen's early years (1992–1996)

Abstract

Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) was certainly one of the greatest fashion designers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Creator of an authorial work McQueen has become the subject of study of numerous researchers. In this article, using a sociological approach, we’ll analyze the designer's early creative phase, specifically his production between the years 1992 and 1996. Reflecting on some of his esthetic results, this article seeks to characterize how DIY appears in his work as a type of epistemological solution conditioned to social, political, and economic issues. Thinking about the gains that come from using DIY as well as the concessions that are made when his work is absorbed into the fashion mainstream, McQueen will be taken as a heuristic example that helps us describe and qualify even more complex phenomena of contemporaneity as the change in the fashion system and the new phases of capitalism.

I draw inspiration from the streets of the city, from the kids in Hoxton, to the punks in Caden, to a chic lady walking down Bond Street.

Alexander McQueen

I didn't care about the money. But I did care about my freedom.

Alexander McQueen

Introduction

This article approaches the area that has come to be called Fashion Studies, which will be given a sociological perspective to treat and qualify the use of DIY practices in contemporary fashion, specifically in the initial production of British designer Alexander McQueen (1969–2010). For this, we use a diachronic cut that extends from 1992 (the year of his first fashion show, after completing his MA at Central Saint Martins) and 1996 (the year in which he is co-opted by the French luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) to be creative director of the Givenchy).

Through the use of testimonies collected both in the academic bibliography and in interviews, journalistic books, and biographies about the designer's professional trajectory, we aim to demonstrate how the initial absence of resources and institutional/corporate sponsorship was crucial not only for McQueen to explore the DIY practices, so traditional to English fashion since the punk of the 1970s, but also to liberate—thematically and esthetically—his production, making it a true cultural landmark of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

A brief background

When studying British cultural production, especially that developed in London in the 1990s it is necessary to point out how certain socio-economic factors were central to its emergence. Experiencing an intense labor crisis, a remnant of the difficult post-war recovery of industry and the monetarist-neoliberal restructuring of the Margaret Thatcher administration (1979–1990), the United Kingdom of the late 20th century was certainly a challenging territory for the survival of cultural initiatives. With little public investment in arts and culture—for Thatcherism, an outdated state paternalism—this generation was repeatedly left to fend for itself. With the exception of some programs, such as the EAS, the Enterprise Allowance Scheme—a financial aid of 40 pounds a week for young people who set up their own businesses ¹ —the period was marked by the absence of a major government projects. ²

The youngest of six children, Lee Alexander McQueen ³ was born on March 17, 1969 in Stepney. Socially, the McQueens were part of the English working class, dependent on free education and government public policies, and experiencing the years of post-war crisis that displaced a large part of this population to the periphery of London. The son of an elementary school teacher and a taxi driver, McQueen shows symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder from an early age, which turned his school years into a terrible experience. His difficulty in learning and the fact that he was homosexual, makes him a target for teenage bullying, and he was nicknamed “McQueer” by other students. For fashion historians Judith Watt and Kristin Knox, the inhospitable environment of school led the young Lee to leave school at 16 to be apprentice on London's traditional tailors’ street, Savile Row, where he would work first for Anderson & Sheppard, and then for Gieves & Hawkes (Knox, 2010; Watt, 2012).

After his experience with men's tailoring on Savile Row, McQueen would be hired by the Angels and Bermans atelier, which was specialized in theatrical costumes and after a short period assisting the Japanese designer Koji Tatsuno, he moved to Milan to be an assistant at Romeo Gigli. Returning from Italy the following year, the designer reportedly approached Bobby Hillson, founder of the MA in Fashion at Central Saint Martins, ⁴ with a view to getting a job at the school. Hillson, who recognized the young boy's innate talent, nevertheless invited him to join the new master's class (Figueredo, 2018a). Even without completing the basic credits of the English education system—the first student to be accepted into the Central Saint Martins MA under these terms—McQueen entered the course, which he would conclude in 1992 with the now mythical collection Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.

The first collection

On March 16, 1992, in the Duke of York's Headquarters, a 19th century building located between the Kensington and Chelsea areas, the graduation show of the MA Fashion students of Central Saint Martins was held. On this day, Alexander McQueen launched his first collection and his eponymous brand. Jack The Ripper Stalks His Victims (1992) was unlike anything the other students of the course had created ⁵ ; it was fashion with shocking artistry: “McQueen was a careerist, and he knew that such an aggressive collection would attract attention” (Callahan, 2015: 49).

Isabella Blow, then fashion editor of British Vogue, snuck into the audience at McQueen's show at the last minute. A caricature figure of the 1990s, Blow “casually took heroin, dated Jean-Michel Basquiat, became friends with Warhol and spent time with Anna Wintour at American Vogue” (Callahan, 2015: 49): “Issie had a good eye, everyone in the fashion world knew that” (Callahan, 2015: 49), which drew even more attention to Lee's pieces when she was willing to buy the entirely collection for the sum of 3500 pounds. Jack The Ripper was “about sabotage and tradition—everything that, I think, the 1990s represented” (Callahan, 2015: 49) she would say later.

Renowned for discovering and mentoring emerging British fashion talent—such as Philip Treacy and Julien MacDonald—Blow's role would be of fundamental importance to McQueen's career both from a conceptual point of view, since she was known for cultivating in his protégés a peculiar taste, and from a symbolic and financial point of view. Seeing in the designer the vanguard of British fashion, Issie allowed him and his boyfriend, fellow designer Andrew Groves, to move into her Elizabeth Street home and set up a basement studio; she introduced him to various people in the fashion world and used his clothes in an editorial photographed by Italian Oberto Gili for Vogue UK, something completely unimaginable for a recent graduate student.

From Taxi Driver to Dante: Financial autonomy and DIY

From a historical perspective, DIY has always been associated with alternative visions about society, consumption, esthetics, ways of being (Guerra, 2017; Jones, 2014), structuring an ethos, and praxis that sustains counter-hegemonic spheres of cultural and artistic production different from those that are named mainstream (Bennett, 2018; Guerra, 2018). In other words, DIY becomes an epistemological solution—consciously or unconsciously adopted—that allows agents and practices allocated against the dominant culture to find some way of subsistence. So it's not just bones and pins used for T-shirt customization, ⁶ but the inauguration of a whole circular chain of production and consumption that activates members of these alternative scenes (Thornton, 1997).

With regard to McQueen's initial creation, DIY can be verified in at least three aspects: (i) in the mobilization of networks of counter-hegemonic agents; (ii) in the precariousness and informality of the investments made to afford its practice; and (iii) in the liberation of the practice itself that allows to experiment esthetically with the clothes, customizing pieces a minute before they enter the catwalk or exploring cuts and productions that would rarely be accepted by the mainstream circuit. Taking some testimonies collected and information retrieved from various bibliographies on the subject, we will now exemplify how such practices manifested themselves in his creation from the first collection, Taxi Driver (1993), to Dante (1996), the last collection created as a designer totally independent of the circuit.

In Taxi Driver (1993) McQueen collected images of people killed during the Sandinista movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the revolution in Nicaragua, which were printed in black and white on cheap cotton that the designer used to create short dresses and skater-style skirts. “He also incorporated the image of Robert De Niro's character Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's 1976 psychological drama Taxi Driver” (Thomas, 2015a: 106) and experimented with new materials such as latex. In this collection McQueen would also create one of his most iconic pieces, the Bumster Pants, restructuring the height of the waist to show the coccyx, in his view a “very underexposed erogenous zone” (Thomas, 2015a: 106).

Advised by Isabella Blow, who also provided the financial and material means to create the pieces, the fashion show attracted a large mass of journalists. Bobby Hillson, director of the MA in Fashion at Central Saint Martins, said Taxi Driver carried a deeper and distressing message, “it was his vision and nobody else's. He took you into his world. He made you see his vision. You were in another world” (Thomas, 2015a: 112), a world in which the brutality of human nature was accepted without trying to suppress it. The failure documentation about this collection can be explained by the fact that after the show, McQueen and Simon Ungless—a collaborator in several collections—went to the Soho gay club called Man Stink, and without money to pay for the hat shop, “they hid the bagged clothes behind trash cans, (…) those pieces would be lost forever” (Callahan, 2015: 68). All very crude, as several of her historians and biographers point out (Knox, 2010; Thomas, 2015a; Watt, 2012), pulsing with youthful, uncompromising energy.

In Nihilism (1994), his next collection, McQueen would again abuse the combative esthetic that characterized the early years of his work: making the models look shocking, “painting them with clotted blood; he wrapped them in plastic, soaked the clothes until they were transparent, and sent the girls down the runway with their tops cut to hip height and their vulvas exposed” (Callahan, 2015: 91). In Banshee (1994), the following winter, a fashion show that for sociologist Caroline Evans (2012: 141) “set the tone for others over the next few years,” McQueen expressed his dark romanticism and “developed an aesthetic of cruelty” (Evans, 2012: 141). Completely out of money, “the collection and the show were underwritten by his welfare checks; cash infusions from Detmar Blow” (Thomas, 2015a: 116), then husband of Isabella Blow, his main patron: a scene of intense energy and wide-ranging esthetic transgression, counterbalanced by immense informality in the economic context.

Trino Verkade, Lee's assistant on these first collections, sheds some light on how professional and contractual arrangements were formalized in this scenario, “neither of us were making money and there were times when I had to pay for bits and pieces myself” (Verkade in Frankel 2015: 74). Extremely informal and without any kind of resources, this was the perfect setting for the evolution of DIY practices. As Sebastian Pons confirms,

At the time, Hoxton Square wasn’t how it is today. It was pretty scary, rough. Yet it was increasingly a destination for Young artists, drawn to the area for its relatively affordable commercial and living spaces. I get there, I go down to the basement and there's nothing there. Nothing at all. I thought I would find mannequins, sewing machines, and cutting tables. But there's nothing. Just Lee, a packet of cigarettes and a few tables in boxes he’d bought from Ikea. (Pons in Frankel, 2015: 74)

Even facing these economic limitations, McQueen managed to gather a very relevant network of collaborators. Sarah Burton, the designer's assistant and who would be appointed creative director of the label after his death, recalls that, “there wasn’t any money, but anything is possible, (…) just don’t give him a no for an answer. That's how it worked” (Burton in Fury, 2015: 223). In this collaborative scenario, McQueen had “gathered a disparate group of collaborators to help achieve the spectacular and unconventional effect he desired” (Fury 2015: 223): friend Simon Ungless would develop the prints for the collections and Katy England—of the newly opened Dazed & Confused magazine—would sign on as her brand's stylist.

In the face of such informality, McQueen would become known for seeking creative ways to execute his vision. ⁷ When he was a student, for example, he had written a letter to the well-known set designer Simon Costin about his admiration for his work. Finding out about the designer's work later, in response “Costin would ask if McQueen would let him build the set for his next collection. McQueen had no budget and Costin was happy to work for free, and that's what happened” (Callahan, 2015: 119). Then, in September 1994, McQueen launched The Birds (1995); with a catwalk produced by Costin, prints created by Ungless and paraded by famous characters in the London subculture such as Mr Pearl—the iconic corset designer. This collection, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name, featured all the experimentation and inventiveness that his status as an independent designer could guarantee. Trino Verkade recalls that McQueen decided at the last minute to paint the models with tire marks, “we literally took a tire off my car and rolled it in the grease that was on the ground and then we put it on their bodies; (…), It was very raw. Something you do when you're young and open” (Verkade in Callahan, 2015: 119). After the presentation, McQueen and Groves, would meet with the Italian fashion manufacturer Eo Bocci,

He had just seen the fashion show and told McQueen he wanted to buy 51 percent of the business for 10,000 pounds. Lee said ‘fuck off’, Groves recalls. “It was the natural reaction of ‘You dragged me all the way down here to insult me by saying that?’ I don't even think it was about the money, it was the 51 percent control.” “Alexander knew his worth, and he was right,” Philip Treacy later commented. “He was pretty hardcore back then. He thought established designers were crap, just worthless.” In the end, they made a deal: Bocci would license McQueen's name for a few years, and McQueen would finally have some cash on hand. He felt that the next show, whatever it was, would be the last one he could throw himself into entirely. (Groves in Callahan, 2015: 120–121)

Highland Rape (1995), paid with Bocci's money, it was McQueen's first show to be on the official London Fashion Week calendar. This show featured plaid military jackets, destroyed and torn dresses, pieces with missing sleeves, and skirts and pants cut so low that they seemed to defy the sense of gravity. McQueen instructed the models to walk the runway looking postfight fatigue: wild and covered in bloodstains, their breasts often on display. In response, much of the press accused him of misogyny because of the images brought by the collection: seminaked, brutalized women, and the use of the word “rape” in the title. McQueen clarified, however, that the “rape” was that suffered by Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellions. “I’d studied the history of the Scottish upheavals and the Clearances… Highland Rape is about England's rape of Scotland, (…), I want to show the war between Scottish and English was basically genocide” (McQueen in Evans, 2012: 142).

Bringing McQueen closer to the protagonist of the film Peeping Tom (1960), a photographer who “murders women in the act of photographing them by means of a bayonet attached to his tripod so that the camera becomes the instrument of the death it records” (Evans, 2012: 142), Highland Rape served to paint the designer's image as the enfant-terrible of British fashion. The hostility that characterized Lee's esthetics and performance in these early years was also apparent in their contempt for the established fashion system. When American Vogue requested a Highland Rape dress for an editorial, McQueen said he would only lend the garment if the magazine take it and fly it back to New York in an exclusive seat with someone accompanying it. It was his way of saying fuck it, “that dress cost us seven pounds,” recalls Andrew Groves. “We paid three pounds for the fabric and a pound for the spray paint” (Callahan, 2015: 124).

The Hunger (1996), his next collection, the second to be shown under the watchful eyes of the British Fashion Council, was inspired by Paul Schrader's erotic thriller Cat People (1982) and the eponymous 1983 film The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott. About this collection, Sebastian Pons recalls: “I never asked him for any Money because I knew he didn’t have any,” and “it was not easy. But I knew I was part that something that was going to be big—that was going to pay off in the long term” (Pons in Thomas, 2015a: 153–154). For one of the dresses, McQueen created a transparent, structured corset filled with maggots. “He was obsessed with death—he found it quite romantic—and was talking about worms and rotting matter all the time” (Pons in Thomas, 2015a: 155). Getting maggots from a fish carcass and bringing them to the show 2 hours earlier, the designer placed them under a Perspex frame, covered them with thin, clear plastic, and pressed the two parts of the piece onto the model's body, like a putrid sandwich.

In Dante (1996)—for Callahan (2015: 145), “his most sinister and seductive show until that moment”—McQueen took inspiration from the theological poem The Divine Comedy (1472) by Italian Dante Alighieri. Images of the Vietnam War by celebrated photographer Don McCullin were exhaustively reproduced without any permission on jackets and dresses, and the collection's accessories were made by iconic English hatter Philip Treacy (a partnership made possible once again by Isabella Blow). Still enjoying the freedom inherent in those who have not yet formalized a “deal with the devil,” Dante represented a sarcastic commentary on the fashion system and celebrity culture. As friend and collaborator Simon Costin recalls, McQueen had put a skeleton in the front row, and while the press speculated what he was trying to say about the superficiality of fashion, they missed the obvious: “His exact words were: Those skeletal fashion cows in the front row” (Costin in Callahan, 2015: 145).

For Eo Bocci, who had licensed the McQueen name, Dante was a sales success. Although the designer did not have an industrial logic of production, hardly being able to fulfill the orders placed, requests were made by important stores in the field: Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Charivari, Linda Dresner, Maxfield and Ultimos, all in the United States, as well as the Isetan group in Japan (Thomas, 2015a; Wilson, 2015). A milestone in the label's history, this collection changed the game for the young designer. Everything McQueen had been working toward became real. He was named British Designer of the Year by the British Fashion Council; had the most illustrious space at London Fashion Week, showing last and he won major financial backing from Onward Kashiyama (Callahan, 2015: 142).

In May of that year, 2 months after Dante's presentation, McQueen signed a distribution deal with Gibo, ⁸ who decided to keep his studio in London: “The Japanese want me to stay in London because they recognize I’m the largest thing here. There's no use going to Paris or Milan and just being a small fish” (McQueen in Thomas, 2015a: 167), said the designer at the time. In addition, Kim Blake who looked after her business in London negotiated a generous sponsorship for the upcoming shows (around £20,000 sterling per show) with US financier American Express—“For The Birds we had four Thousand pounds and a bucket for me to stand on. The American Express deal was a complete turning point” (Blake in Thomas, 2015a: 160). In October of the same year, McQueen would be announced as the new creative director of the French maison Givenchy, replacing another British designer, John Galliano, who would take over the Christian Dior.

On the hiring of the designer by the brand, belonging to Bernard Arnault's LVMH congl omerate, historian Judith Watt (2012: 98) states that “it was this Independence of thought, this originality, that made Lee McQueen attractive to LVMH.” In 1996, there was a position at the maison Dior as creative director, Arnault gave the job to Galliano but needed to replace him at Givenchy, McQueen was the obvious choice and “Arnault had persuaded him with the sweetener of 1 million pounds over a two-year deal” (Watt, 2012: 99). What mattered to LVMH was not really the innovative ideology and revolutionary character of McQueen's DIY experimentation: what really instigated them was the designer's media potential, the free publicity that compensated for the millionaire salary and the exorbitant expenses of the shows. For fashion designer and personal friend Miguel Adrover, “McQueen was nothing more than a flashy acquisition for LVMH; (…) Lee represented the days that were living. Givenchy was already dead” (Adrover in Callahan, 2015: 167).

From that moment on, creating eight collections a year—six at Givenchy and two for his own house—McQueen began to alternate between London and Paris. Despite the workload, Lee accepted the post because, in his words, “I decided to sink that big Money into my own company, to take on more staff. The Givenchy position gave me both credibility and the funding I needed” (McQueen in Thomas, 2015a: 213). Sam Gainsbury, producer of l his shows, says that the relationship with Givenchy was essential for a new phase of McQueen's career, more serious and professionalized, less underground and consequently less open to the excessively informal dynamics of DIY. In Gainsbury's words, Givenchy took McQueen to a whole other level: “I think that was the point when everyone suddenly came to London to see the McQueen show. Because of the extra funding, because Lee put all his wages back into it, things changed. He used Givenchy as a vehicle to finance McQueen” (Gainsbury in Frankel, 2015: 75).

If in the next collections (between 1997 and 2001) it would still be possible to identify an experimental McQueen—although more professionalized—the scenario would gradually change from the sale of most of the shares of his company to the Gucci Group. Progressively pushed toward a more corporate logic—of sale and profit—the playful element of shock and esthetic research of the designer, the result of the liberated dynamics of DIY at the beginning of his career, would be gradually supplanted by a modus operandi adjusted to the new world of luxury that was being consolidated at this time.

Underground scenes and DIY practices in McQueen's career, expanding the debate

Regarding the alternative scenes, it should be noted that Alexander McQueen circulated among the most radical spaces of London's nightlife at the time. From the gay clubs of Soho to the Bondage, Discipline (or Domination), Sadism (or Submission), Masochism scene and drag nights where Stela Stlin, Divine David, and Leigh Bowery performed, the designer was a regular in the underworld cultures. “We’d probably start somewhere near Soho, like the gay pub Comptons on Old Compton Street, do a little bit of a pub crawl,” remembers his friend and fellow Saint Martins student Simon Ungless (Thomas, 2015b: w/p).

“Then on to some not-so-savoury place, like a club called Man Stink. Oh my God! We loved that place! It was this really awful pub in King's Cross, downstairs in a kind of cellar. There were these tunnel catacombs where God knows what was going on, but the house music was absolutely fantastic.” Ungless remember that Man Stink “was off the beaten track—most people wouldn’t know about it.” But that's what McQueen loved about it; that it was “totally underground” (Guerra & Figueredo, 2020: 238; Thomas, 2015b).

Nicholas Towsend recalls that McQueen was an avid consumer of amyl nitrate (poppers) and occasionally took ecstasy (his cocaine habit appeared late in life). “We would go to a night called Marvellous in Brixton, which played Blondie and T-Rex and even disco, and we’d dance like crazy.” ⁹ The now internationally renowned designer Julien MacDonald, McQueen's assistant in the 1990s, recalls that he once made him a turtleneck with transparent vertical panels that showed off his chest. He allegedly called the garment Get Your Tits Out, and when asked by MacDonald where the inspiration had come from, “he told me that it reminded him of a fetish outfit he had seen in a club the night before” (MacDonald apud. Thomas, 2015b: s/p). Taking his designs to the club, and bringing inspirations from the club to the catwalk, McQueen's production consolidated a process of feedback between distinct domains that can be described as “club to catwalk to club again” ¹⁰ (Guerra & Figueredo, 2020, 2023).

This creative freedom, combined with the desire to get things done and the low codification of the profession—without any kind of effective public subsidy—has culminated in the informalism that leads to DIY practices, which are the solution to staying in the scene: “Nobody is interested in me apart from this mad fucking rich woman [Isabella Blow]” (McQueen in Wilson, 2015: 100). Fleet Bigwood, a print tutor on the Saint Martins MA course, recalls “He was motivated to tell everyone to fuck off, the industry, the journalists and the buyers. He felt frustrated, he felt nobody gave him any recognition or understood what he had to offer” (Wilson, 2015: 100).

Regarding the DIY practices in McQueen's early career and its connection with the people who lived in the same alternative scenes, we can still recover some testimonies. In Banshee collection, for example, Andrew Groves recalls that one day he and Lee were walking down Elizabeth Street when McQueen spotted a roll of clear plastic wrap. “Let's make a dress of this!”(Groves in Wilson, 2015: 117). Stylist Katy England also recalls that in the absence of financial resources, they had to be creative:

It was literally any fabric he could lay his hands on or that he could beg, steal or borrow. I think you see a real rawness to this time. I suppose the fabrics were cheap, so then he would think, ‘What can I do to make them more interesting?’ So he put car spray paint on or látex; (…), This was not a commercial operation, (…), McQueen's clothes became his currency, a way of paying models, as well as his team. (England in Blanchard, 2015: n/p)

In The Birds, “he was sewing things himself,” England remembers. “It was amazingly good fun and very exciting” (England in Blanchard, 2015: n/p). Basic items such as underwear or shoes were often missing. Seta Niland, a friend McQueen met who was working as a stylist for The Face, realized they had no money to buy underwear for the models—“On the day of the show itself, seeing a roll of cling film, Seta had an idea and she started to pull out swathes of it and wrap it around the models—Necessity breeds genius and creativity” (Wilson, 2015: 103). Katy England recalls how she often had to come up with solutions at the last minute. For The Birds their tight budget didn’t cover shoes for the runway shows, so they had to improvise,

I went to Oxfam and I bought old shoes with high heels and basically cut off the top part so that you’re only left with the sole, and we sellotaped them onto the girls’ feet. Things weren’t quite as polished then as they are now—when the zip on the back of one model's outfit broke moments before a show, Lee just wrapped Sellotape around to keep the dress on, and off she went. (England in Allwood, 2015: n/p)

At the beginning, every single piece he made went on the runway—“he wasn’t really making that much, so we had to use everything,” England explains. “In some cases we didn’t have enough clothes!” For the controversial Highland Rape show they were a bit short, so England took a trip to the army surplus store to supplement the collection. “We borrowed trousers to put with some of the jackets because we didn’t have enough clothes. I don’t think anyone noticed!” (England in Allwood, 2015: n/p).

A kind of honorary member of the Brit Art Movement, McQueen's production was about more than just fashion. As the designer himself once said “For me, what I do is an artistic expression. which is channeled through me. Fashion is just the medium” (McQueen apud. Bolton, 2011: 4)—perhaps it was this rapprochement with the artistic spirit of the time that enabled McQueen to circulate in these creative scenes and produce from very unique registers and epistemologies, which later, when absorbed by a consolidated fashion industry, were no longer sustained by the demands of creation in a capitalist regime where sales and profits ultimately sublimated any disruptive poetics.

Abandoning DIY: Psychic cost in the careers of young designers

When Alexander McQueen graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1992, Britain was still in the recession that marked the early years of that decade. ¹¹ The fashion industry was far from being the corporate giant it would become in the following years and the “Sad End of London Fashion Week” ¹² —ironically named so by the young designers—only featured old-fashioned and traditional brands, without major esthetic innovations. With the most successful British designers like John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood showing in Paris, London needed an injection of new blood and “McQueen, at the forefront of a generation of Young, hopeful, independent names, gave the fashion industry everything it could possibly have wished—and more” (Frankel, 2015: 69).

For sociologist Diana Crane (2001), several factors contributed to creating a situation in England in which the young designer developed more affinity with antagonistic dress than with upper-class styles: the atmosphere of the art and design schools, the richness of urban street cultures, the ideology of dress as a personal statement of subversion as opposed to the conformity of their parents’ generation, as well as the scarcity of opportunities for young designers in the British clothing industry. It is in this sense that art serves both to protect designers from the logic of the market, but also as a distinctive and differentiating mark of their presence in the market (McRobbie 1998: 105).

Echoing the art historian Roselee Goldberg's view that the dynamic environment of the New York art scene in the 1960s and early 1970s was fostered by the then low cost of living, London's cultural rise in design and visual arts found numerous artists taking advantage of affordable, previously industry-oriented studios (including McQueen's workspace in Hoxton), which ensured a degree of blurring between cultural areas and the level of informality necessary for the proliferation of very distinctive logic of creation. On this theme, artist Jake Chapman remembered the studio he and his brother Dinos shared: “ours was an old warehouse in the Old Kent Road. Waste was outside our studio, next to McDonalds. It was a continuous plane of sculptural wreckage, mess and some art. Lee's studio was a little more organized. This atmosphere facilitated unique opportunities for artistic exchange and collaboration. We gave him drawings, he sent clothes which no human could physically wear” (Chapman in Whitley, 2015: 171).

This level of freedom, impossible to sustain when such avant-garde practices—let's say underground—enter the more traditional spaces—the mainstream—has to be continuously negotiated by these creators as their productions find consumer markets in more legitimized coordinates. ¹³ In McQueen's case, the sale of his brand to the Gucci Group, initially crucial for the consolidation of his fashion language (the tailoring with impeccable quality, the performative shows at the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds, the artisanal care with the products, etc) is progressively transformed into a commercial pressure whose cost is the psychic suffering of the creator. As Stephan Pereira stated in an interview with Sam Jones (2010: s/p), “McQueen had suffered from insomnia, anxiety and depression since his hiring by Givenchy in 1997, (…), the overdoses he suffered were not essentially suicide attempts but a cry for help.”

His addiction to drugs—cocaine was his favorite and often necessary in the work environment (since the period at Givenchy) to resist the long hours in the atelier (Wilson, 2015)—his peculiar relationship with sex—“Lee was very sexual, (…), he went to a lot of gay flogging sex clubs, underground clubs, (…), he had to be sexually humiliated to get work done (Callahan, 2015: 180; Wilson, 2015: 91)—and the obsession with death, aggravated since Isabella Blow's suicide in 2007, would be pulsions that manifested a state of perennial anguish, a kind of chronic dissatisfaction that is exacerbated by the creative limitations in his production. In an interview recovered by Claire Wilcox, fashion curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, McQueen recognized the need for profit that corporate logic imposed on his business: “my mind is constantly working overtime to come up with a concise and directional collection that is fundamentally sellable, but is also on a higher plane, on an artistic level” (Wilcox, 2015: 33). For the historian Judith Watt, “dealing with too much money and satisfying the backers supplying it, rather than a lack of finances, was now part of the problem: the collection had to sell for its owners” (Watt, 2012: 225).

Therefore, with “the pressure for expansion, (…) McQueen produced collections by the Gucci Group that were commercially driven to the detriment of his scene and the feats of craftsmanship now expected of him” (Watt, 2012: 223). While collections such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (2005) and Neptune (2006) represented real commercial successes for the house, recovering in two seasons some of the financial loss of the more experimental collections, esthetically they were harshly received. Dana Thomas (2015a: 333) argues that the only thing notable about that show (Neptune) was McQueen wearing a T-shirt that read “WE LOVE YOU KATE” to support model Kate Moss, who had recently lost several lucrative contracts after being filmed snorting cocaine.

Despite the fact that “McQueen's overall collection had increased from 120 to 600 pieces, (…), and that sales, (…) had gone up 400 percent” (Watt, 2012: 192), the loss of its more experimental aspect led to harsh criticism by the fashion establishment—“They were rich-lady clothes and they didn’t have any of his coolness, or his magic, (…), the rawness goes missing when things get slick and corporate” (Thomas, 2015a: 334). On McQueen's difficulty in accepting the new corporate reality, Mimma Viglezio, Vice President of Corporate Communications, recalls that

He would go over the budget by millions—he was useless with money that way—and when I would call and say ‘Lee, we can’t afford this’, he would storm into the office and yell in his Cockney accent. He would pick up the phone and yell at everyone, (…), ‘but it's my company—I own fifty percent’, he would howl, ‘why can’t I decide?’. Yes, you own fifty percent but the other fifty percent is owned by shareholders and we must answer them too. ‘I understand’, he’d eventually admit. ‘I must remember I’m also a businessman’. He was humble enough to accept it, until it came up again. (Viglezio in Thomas, 2015a: 339–340)

Certainly a factor that can be considered as part of the psychic suffering of the designer, from whom collections were expected to be both genius and saleable—in McQueen's own words to Watt, “no one in the fashion press or the buyers actually sees the trauma you go through to get things done” (Watt, 2012: 223)—this exhaustion in subjectivity (a kind of burnout) would be conditioned to the changes in the productive logic itself, or rather, in the rapid and disturbing passage from free experimentation (in which DIY logic prevailed) to a creative typology more suited to the insatiable capitalist machine.

In 2009, when visiting his friend and former collaborator Sebastian Pons in San Francisco, McQueen reportedly said that he had designed his last collection. In the excerpt from the interview granted by Pons to Dana Thomas (2015a), it is possible to perceive the anguish and anxiety experienced by the designer:

“He came to say goodbye”, Pons says now. “I Knew”. As he was leaving, McQueen told Pons: “I’ve designed my last collection.” “What?” Pons responded astonish. “And in the collection, I kill myself.” “What do you mean?” Pons sputtered. “Remember when I did the madhouse—the glass house—and we unveiled the woman?” “Yes,” said Pons. “I’m going to redo it and I’m going to be in the box, and in the end, I’m going to shoot myself” Pons was speechless. McQueen left and flew back to London. “I never saw him again,” Pons says now. Shortly after, Pons called McQueen's assistant in London to express his concern. “I’m really upset,” Pons told her. “He's not well.” “No, no,” she responded. “He's fine.”” (Pons in Thomas, 2015a: 349)

After this episode, McQueen also traveled to Milan for another of the shows of his men's line, at the time something quite important for the corporation and that required his active participation in the process—“menswear accounted for 20 percent of McQueen's business” (Thomas, 2015a: 350). Shortly after, on October 6, 2009, McQueen would show his Spring/Summer women's collection, the last one he finished in his lifetime. Entitled Plato's Atlantis (2010), this show brought the level of experimentation for which he became known: it was the first show in the world to be broadcast live through the online platform SHOW-studio, dedicated to the promotion of fashion films, by photographer and friend Nick Knight.

On February 11, 2010, just a few days after the death of his mother Joyce, who was fighting an aggressive cancer, McQueen would hang himself in his apartment in the London neighborhood of Mayfair after consuming, according to Thomas (2015a: 355), expressive amounts of “cocaine, zopiclone sleeping pills, and the painkiller/tranquilizer midazolam.” On the back cover of The Descent of Man, a catalog of an exhibition inspired by the Darwin work of artist Wolf von Lenkiewicz, the designer is said to have scribbled his farewell note; at its end: “Please, look after my dogs. Sorry, I love you, Lee” (Jones, 2010: s/p).

Concluding notes

According to Callahan, McQueen “was the first fashion designer whose death was felt as a great cultural, generational loss, on the level of Kurt Cobain's suicide or the accidental deaths of River Phoenix and Heath Ledger” (Callahan, 2015: 234). On February 18, 2010, Robert Polet, then president of Pinault Printemps Redoute (PPR), ¹⁴ announced that the Alexander McQueen label would continue after its founder's death, notifying the press that the next show would take place on March 10 at the Hôtel de Clermont in Paris, featuring the only 16 looks McQueen had actually finalized. On May 27, 2010, Sarah Burton, collection coordinator and his right-hand woman since 1996, was announced as the house's new creative director. Once the mourning period was respected, the message was given: for the corporate world, the machine can never stop.

Regarding the central object of this reflection, that is, the mobilization of DIY in the early years of the designer's production, it is still possible to make certain considerations. In a previous investigation, we noted how Alexander McQueen's work, from 1992 to 2010, can be observed from at least four phases ¹⁵ (Figueredo, 2018a). In this scheme, what we sought to demonstrate was how the modality of capital invested in his production affected the type of esthetic experimentation he used to make. Thus, if in the initial years there was almost total freedom, with the passage of time and the incursion of new sources of funding, ways of censorship and interdiction also emerged. From disapproval by American Express—one of his sponsors in the second half of the 1990s—over the title of the Spring/Summer 1998 show (initially The Golden Shower, replaced by Untitled) to PPR's continued demand for collections that would break into sales in the second half of the 2000s, the inflow of capital proved inversely proportional to the level of creative autonomy.

Focusing, however, on the first phase of this process, that is, from 1992 to 1996, from this brief study we can apprehend certain situations: (a) in the absence of an official or permanent source of funds, DIY presents itself as one of the most interesting career paths for young creators; (b) it is therefore an epistemological solution that allows designers to continue working while waiting for better conditions; (c) the level of informality and the low codification of artistic professions also facilitate the approximation and creative exchange between different agents of this universe, be they artists, designers, photographers, stylists, etc; (d) momentarily constituting a cultural scene, these universes end up conforming their own economies that can manifest themselves in certain territorialities—in the case of the British, the East End, Soho, etc; (e) as alternative scene freed from esthetic scripts and traditional sociabilities, these practices are often responsible for an engineering of enchantment in the most consolidated spaces of the social world, and from time to time, they end up entering the mainstream not without first undergoing adaptations and transformations aimed at adjusting them to the sensibilities and needs of contemporary consumers.

In this sense, we can apprehend “McQueen's world was a Manichean one of checks and balances, where everything—cruelty, beauty, sex, death, Money, love—could be weighed, bought, sold and pictured” (Evans, 2012: 293), that is, a world of experiences and tensions that are commonly denied or obliterated in the traditional social world—in its morality and ethical conception—but which is treated in a fetishistic and then commodified way. For researcher Catherine Spooner, this is also why McQueen would have been “repeatedly Gothicized by the press, who tended to construct him as a mercurial Jekyll and Hyde figure” an image that evidently achieved its purpose, allowing him to “cultivate a particular brand, in which he alternately featured as East End hooligan and tortured artistic genius” ¹⁶ (Spooner, 2015: 154).

If, as sociologist Paula Guerra (2022: 55) writes, “the genesis of DIY is centered on providing an alternative response to current societal problems,” reflecting on the conditions that make such practices emerge in a historical reality and then verifying their transit, that is, how they can be appropriated by a hegemonic culture, is also a way of uncovering the material and symbolic chains of rewriting culture as a social practice. From this perspective what we see happening between Jack the Ripper and Plato's Atlantis are not only random esthetic transformations in the trajectory of a creator, but the pernicious way in which the economic world infiltrates and sometimes submits the field of sensibilities. Recently, Daniel Rodgers, fashion critic and journalist for Dazed, in thinking about the conditions that enabled the emergence of the great designers, asks whether designers like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Vivienne Westwood, all hailed as revolutionary working-class heroes, ¹⁷ would be able to kick-start a career in the current climate. ¹⁸

Wondering why someone from a low-income background would want to exacerbate their poverty by entering a sector that is economically structured against them (Rodgers, 2023: n.p.), Rodgers’ text provides clues that such designers were only possible due to the precariousness of a system circumvented at the time through DIY practices—unprofitable businesses, illegal occupations (the famous illegal squats), exchanges and collaborations, free labor, etc. For the critic, impossible to be sustained or reproduced now, these fashionable DIY modalities are apparently relegated to a historical past and that is also why Lee's production, resistant to the end, becomes one of the first tacit proofs of a definitive moment which homo economicus become the devourer of homo aestheticus.