## The Hands That Built the Horn of Plenty
The Hands That Built the Horn of Plenty
Simon Ungless sits at a corner table in a Shoreditch café, tracing the outline of a feather headdress on a napkin. He is not sketching for a new collection. He is reconstructing, from memory, the first iteration of what would become Alexander McQueen's 1999 horn — the towering, spiralling headpiece that closed No. 13, the show where models walked through fire and Shalom Harlow stood on a turntable in white cotton while two industrial robots sprayed her with paint.
The horn itself did not appear until ten years later, in the autumn/winter 2009 collection The Horn of Plenty. But Ungless, who met Lee McQueen at Central Saint Martins in 1990 and collaborated with him until 1996, says the idea had been circulating since the mid-nineties. "He wanted something that looked like it had grown out of the skull," Ungless recalls in a 2018 interview with AnOther. "Not applied. Grown."
The final piece — a towering spiral of hand-painted canvas, horsehair, and reclaimed trash — was not McQueen's alone. It was built by Guido Palau, the hairdresser who had worked with McQueen since 1997, in collaboration with milliner Philip Treacy and a team of five wig technicians whose names do not appear in the show notes. One of them was Sharon Dowsett, a freelance wig maker who had been constructing sculptural hair for Palau since 2003. Another was Tomohiro Ohashi, a Japanese technician trained in traditional katsura construction, the art of building wigs for kabuki theatre.
They worked in a basement studio in King's Cross over four weeks in late 2009. The structure began with a wire armature, shaped by Treacy, which Palau then wrapped in canvas. Dowsett and Ohashi applied horsehair in sections, gluing and stitching each layer to mimic the texture of matted wool. The final spiral was painted by McQueen himself, who arrived on the last day with tins of acrylic and a palette knife. He worked for six hours, layering ochre, burnt sienna, and flecks of gold leaf onto the surface until it looked, as he told Palau, "like something dug up."
The trash — shredded magazine pages, plastic bottle caps, fragments of lace — was applied by stylist Katy England, who had been McQueen's closest collaborator since 1996. England does not give interviews, but Palau described her process in a 2012 talk at the V&A: she tore, she burned, she glued. The debris was not random. Each fragment referenced a past McQueen collection. A scrap of tartan from Highland Rape. A piece of lace from The Overlook. A shard of mirror from Voss.
The model who wore the final piece was Raquel Zimmermann. She had walked for McQueen twice before, but this was the first time she had been fitted for a headpiece that required a neck brace. The horn weighed eleven pounds. It was balanced on a custom-built frame that rested on her shoulders, designed by prosthetics artist Kristyan Mallett, who had previously worked on The Hunger and Interview with the Vampire. Mallett does not appear in the credits. Neither does the structural engineer who calculated the weight distribution, a man named David Neat, who worked for a firm that typically built stage sets for the Royal Opera House.
Zimmermann wore the horn for four minutes. She walked the length of the runway, paused at the end, turned, and walked back. Palau stood in the wings with a pair of bolt cutters in case the frame shifted. It did not. Backstage, McQueen thanked Zimmermann, thanked Palau, and left without speaking to anyone else. England found Dowsett and Ohashi an hour later, still dismantling the armature. She handed them each an envelope with cash and a handwritten note. Dowsett kept hers. It read: "You built the thing I saw."
Guido Palau trained at the Vidal Sassoon Academy in the early eighties, then worked for seven years as a session stylist before meeting McQueen at a casting in 1997. He had no experience with sculptural hair. His work until that point had been editorial — clean, geometric cuts for The Face and i-D. McQueen hired him for It's a Jungle Out There, the spring/summer 1997 show, and asked him to make the models look "feral." Palau shaved their heads, bleached the stubble, and glued on patches of synthetic fur. McQueen told him to come back.
By 2009, Palau had worked on twenty-three McQueen shows. He had built antlers, veils, cages, and crowns. But the horn was different. It was not an accessory. It was architecture. Palau spent two weeks studying the mechanics of hat-making with Philip Treacy, who had been constructing headpieces for McQueen since 1992. Treacy's training was traditional — he had apprenticed with milliners in Ireland and London, learning to shape felt and wire by hand. Palau's approach was improvisational. He used materials that were not meant for hair: fibreglass, epoxy resin, spray foam. Treacy told him it would not hold. Palau built it anyway.
The first prototype collapsed during a fitting. The wire buckled under the weight of the horsehair, and the entire structure folded in on itself. Palau rebuilt it with a steel core, but the weight increased to fourteen pounds. Zimmermann could not walk. Palau stripped it down again, this time using aluminium tubing and a carbon-fibre base. The final version weighed eleven pounds and held.
Sharon Dowsett does not work in fashion anymore. She left the industry in 2011 and now teaches wig-making at the London College of Fashion. She was trained at the BBC's costume department in the nineties, where she learned to construct wigs for period dramas using traditional techniques: knotting individual hairs onto a lace base, one strand at a time. A full wig could take sixty hours. The horn took four weeks because each section had to be built, tested, and rebuilt. Dowsett worked with Ohashi in shifts. He handled the structure; she handled the surface. They did not speak much. Ohashi's English was limited, and Dowsett's Japanese was nonexistent. But they understood the rhythm. Glue, stitch, wait. Glue, stitch, wait.
Tomohiro Ohashi returned to Tokyo in 2010. He continues to build wigs for kabuki theatre and occasionally works on film projects. He has not worked in fashion since McQueen's death.
Kristyan Mallett's prosthetics studio is in a converted warehouse in Hackney. He has been building custom body pieces for film and theatre since 1989, but his work for McQueen was limited to three shows: Voss in 2001, The Horn of Plenty in 2009, and Plato's Atlantis in 2010. He does not consider himself part of the fashion world. "I build things that sit on bodies," he says in a 2015 interview with Dazed. "Fashion is about the body. I'm about what goes on top."
The neck brace for the horn was built in two days. Mallett took a cast of Zimmermann's shoulders and upper spine, then constructed a frame from medical-grade plastic and foam padding. The frame distributed the weight across her shoulder blades and clavicle, allowing her to walk without the piece shifting. It was not visible under her dress. After the show, Mallett dismantled it. The horn now sits in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The brace was discarded.
David Neat, the structural engineer, worked on five McQueen shows between 2008 and 2010. He calculated load-bearing capacities for runway sets, including the rotating platform in The Horn of Plenty and the water tank in Voss. He was not credited in any show notes. When asked about this in a 2013 interview with Building Design, he said: "Theatre doesn't credit the engineers either. You do the work because the work matters."
The horn has been exhibited seven times since McQueen's death. It has been photographed, analysed, and written about in dozens of essays. But until now, the names of the people who built it have appeared only in passing, if at all. Palau is credited. Treacy is credited. The others are footnotes.
Dowsett is fine with that. "It was Lee's vision," she says. "We just made it real."
