Isabella Blow arrived at the 1992 Central Saint Martins graduate show wearing a pheasant

Isabella Blow arrived at the 1992 Central Saint Martins graduate show wearing a pheasant. Not a feather — the entire bird, mounted to a Philip Treacy hat. She bought Lee Alexander McQueen's entire collection for £5,000, paid in instalments of £100 a week. McQueen later said she was the only person in the room who understood what he was trying to do. She wore the pieces until they fell apart.

McQueen built his reputation on disruption — the low-slung bumster trouser, the spray-painted dress delivered by robots, the hologram of Kate Moss as a phantom. But the mythology around his work often flattens the women who stood at its centre. Three in particular shaped not just the clothes, but the house's understanding of beauty, defiance, and what a body could mean on a runway.

Isabella Blow: the discovery

Blow didn't just champion McQueen. She became his first canvas. The bumster trouser — cut so low it redrew the pelvis — was as much hers as his. She wore them with her hips exposed, paired with corsets and those Treacy constructions that looked like they might take flight. McQueen's early shows were small, guerrilla affairs staged in warehouses and abandoned Tube stations. Blow attended every one, often in pieces from the collection, recontextualised with her own wardrobe of historical oddities.

She was not a muse in the passive sense. She introduced McQueen to the people who mattered — stylists, editors, patrons who could fund the next show. She also introduced him to the archive. Her own wardrobe included Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, and obscure Victorian mourning dress. McQueen absorbed it. His 1995 collection, Highland Rape, drew from Scottish history and the Jacobite clearances. The torn lace, the exposed seams, the violence suggested in the construction — it was Blow's understanding of clothing as narrative made literal.

When she died in 2007, McQueen was already at Givenchy and halfway through building the commercial apparatus that would sustain Alexander McQueen as a global house. But he never stopped referencing her. The final show before his own death, Plato's Atlantis, featured those digitally printed reptile skins and the hologram technology, but it also included a print Blow had once described as "a lobster having a nervous breakdown." She would have worn it.

Kate Moss: the ghost

Moss appeared in McQueen's work twice, and both times she wasn't quite there. The first was Voss, spring 2001, staged inside a mirrored cube. Models dressed in razorshells and bandages circled a padded cell while the audience watched their own reflections. At the end, the glass shattered to reveal Moss, naked except for a gas mask, covered in moths. She never moved. The piece was a collaboration with stylist Katy England, but McQueen had asked for Moss specifically. He wanted someone the audience would recognize, then refuse to look at.

The second was Widows of Culloden, autumn 2006. Moss stood on a platform in a white gown while a pyramid of glass rotated around her. As it turned, her image refracted and multiplied — she became a hologram, then a ghost, then something closer to a memory. The effect required sixteen cameras and a technique borrowed from a 1980s Tupac performance, but what McQueen wanted was simpler: a woman who could be present and absent at once.

Moss never walked a McQueen runway in the traditional sense. She was too famous by the time he was staging the shows that required a full cast of unknowns. But her presence in those two pieces defined something central to his work. The body was never just a body. It was a site, a problem, a question the clothes were trying to answer.

Annabelle Neilson: the constant

Neilson was McQueen's closest friend for eighteen years, and she almost never appears in the official record. She wasn't a model. She didn't buy the collections. She was, instead, the person he called at 3 a.m. when a show was collapsing or a seam wasn't sitting right. She appeared in his personal Polaroids, often wearing pieces that never made it to the runway. After his death, she described their relationship as "the only thing that made sense."

Where Blow was the champion and Moss was the image, Neilson was the sounding board. McQueen's shows were technical achievements — the robotic arms in No. 13, the water tank in Voss, the chessboard in Widows of Culloden — but they were also emotional exorcisms. Neilson understood both sides. She had grown up in the same kind of working-class London McQueen had, and she had the same distrust of the fashion establishment's self-seriousness.

She appeared in his work indirectly. The Sarabande foundation, which McQueen established before his death and which continues to fund emerging designers, was named after a piece of music Neilson had played for him. The foundation's first scholars worked in tailoring, metalwork, and millinery — the three disciplines McQueen had trained in before Saint Martins. Neilson sat on the board until her own death in 2018.

What remains

Sarah Burton, who trained under McQueen and took over as creative director after his death, has spoken carefully about the house's relationship to its past. The archive is vast — over 200 pieces in the Victoria and Albert Museum alone — but Burton has resisted the urge to mine it directly. The autumn 2024 collection included a coat with a sleeve cut in the same exaggerated curve McQueen used in The Widows of Culloden, but the cloth was a technical wool-silk blend that didn't exist in 2006. The reference was there, but it wasn't nostalgia.

The three women who shaped McQueen's work were not interchangeable. Blow was the believer, Moss was the image, Neilson was the anchor. What they shared was a refusal to be decorative. McQueen's shows were often described as misogynistic, particularly the early ones with their torn fabric and exposed bodies. But the women he worked with most closely were never victims. They were collaborators, provocateurs, and in Neilson's case, the person who kept him working when the industry threatened to flatten him into a brand.

The house continues. Burton's collections sell. The bumster trouser has been revived, softened, made wearable for a customer who never saw the original show. But the women who defined McQueen's vision remain harder to replicate. You can archive a dress. You can't archive a friendship, or a phone call at 3 a.m., or the particular way someone wears a piece of clothing until it stops being fashion and becomes a fact.