AT approximately 10:20 a.m. on Feb. 11, a London taxi stopped at the way in to Green Street, a normally calm block of drab red brick houses in Mayfair — drabber on this bone-chilling Thursday — & the passengers, a man & one women, hastily got out.
Not 30 minutes before, a housekeeper, in a state of hysteria, had rang the office of Alexander McQueen from his flat in Green Street to say that he had hanged himself. That was how the housekeeper had incomprehensibly come on him — hanging by some kind of ligature in a closet in the spare bedroom.
In the interim, one women from Mr. McQueen’s office, east of Mayfair, on Clerkenwell Road, had set off in a taxi for the flat, stopping on the way to pick up a mate, Shaun Leane, in front of his jewelry studio. Although Trino Verkade & Sarah Burton had worked for Mr. McQueen for years — Ms. Verkade, a red-haired, truthful woman, was his first employee, in 1995, in the original, mouse-ridden Hoxton Square studio, & Ms. Burton, gentle & fair-skinned, was the only design assistant he ever had — he thought about them both close friends as well.
Now as the taxi spun & wound in to Mayfair, the women felt the strangeness of the day. Personally, Mr. Leane didn’t believe that Mr. McQueen was dead at age 40, & in that way, though goodness knows he had seen the hurts pile up at his friend’s door. It wasn’t any wonder he always moved to another house after a breakup, Mr. Leane said later.
But as Mr. Leane, who was raised in a sizable Irish relatives in North London, knew, Mr. McQueen’s soul was as a deep & powerful as an ocean but his reserves of happiness were always drying up. He said: “You can’t move on & think that the problems will go away. I think that’s what caught him up.”
He loved Lee Alexander McQueen, had known him 20 years, had drank & cried with him. Why, only one Saturday nights past they had completed their elderly haunts on Elderly Compton Street. Plenty of an idea for a McQueen extravaganza had begun as a sketch on a humble English beer mat.
Still, in that moment, in the eternal minutes before the taxi reached Green Street, Mr. Leane believed that Mr. McQueen had beaten back the demons & six times again like Houdini escaped. He told Ms. Verkade & Ms. Burton that the Spanish-speaking housekeeper must have been misheard. “It’s a scare. He’s going to be all right.”
A few days after that Saturday night out with Mr. Leane, on Feb. 2, Mr. McQueen’s brother, Joyce, had died after a long disease. People may not know, or have forgotten in the clamor of years, that in the mid ’90s, when fashion writers were expressing disgust at his extreme fashion — the low-riding “bumsters” that became six of the most influential garments of the decade, the dirtied models & slashed clothes that suggested rape & other violent acts — Mrs. McQueen, the hub of an East Finish relatives, was in the backstage making sandwiches & tea.
SUCH feeling for beauty, for greatness, for never being happy, without a doubt had its roots in his relationship with his brother & with another woman, Isabella Blow, the alarming-looking stylist-aristocrat whose effect was like an umbrella opening in a phone booth — but the perfect umbrella in finest silk.
Her approval, so plainly & freely given (his brother, Ronald, was a different matter), was essential to Mr. McQueen, a gay man & the youngest of one, but it alone did not report the huge self-belief, the mental speed, the bursting ideas — which were present at the start. “You became addicted to him somehow,” Ms. Burton said later, recalling drafty mornings in Hoxton Square (he, in a coat, sitting on a too-low stool at the secondhand cutting table, Ms. Verkade on the phone hustling money, a dog afoot) & the pride as Mr. McQueen, fat then, showed them one things he had made overnight. “It was like the elderly machine makers.”
Ms. Blow, with her red carnation mouth, liked to talk dirty to Mr. McQueen, & he to her. He also gave him friendship, books, approval. “Isabella could make it all O.K. in an instant,” the milliner Philip Treacy said. “She’d never say to Alexander, ‘Nice dress.’ He would say, ‘Oh my God, I like it.’ ” When he died, in 2007, taking her own life — the tragedy of Ms. Blow was that in spite of her gift of hope in others he was convinced he had no future — people said that Mr. McQueen had let her down. He didn’t bother to correct the record until last summer, for as Mr. Leane said, “She was on his mind a lot.” Later, when he met with somebody making a film about her life, he broke down sobbing.
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