Les fondateurs de Alexander McQueen

Lee Alexander McQueen stood in the basement of a Victorian townhouse in Hoxton Square, autumn 1992, pinning a jacket to a model who was not, strictly speaking, a model. She was a friend. The jacket was cut from a bolt of grey worsted he had bought in Shepherd's Bush for thirty pounds. The seams were raw. The shoulders were sharp enough to draw blood. McQueen had sixteen pieces and no money. He called the collection Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.

This is not how fashion houses begin. Or at least, it was not how they began until McQueen made it possible.

He was twenty-three. He had spent six years learning to cut on Savile Row — Anderson & Sheppard first, then Gieves & Hawkes — and the Row does not forgive imprecision. A sleeve pitch is either correct or it is not. A lapel either rolls or it buckles. McQueen learned both, then left to work for Koji Tatsuno and later Romeo Gigli in Milan, where he discovered that tailoring could be bent, not just executed. When he returned to London and enrolled at Central Saint Martins, he already knew more about constructing a jacket than most of his tutors.

The Jack the Ripper collection was bought in full by Isabella Blow, who paid for it in instalments. She wore the pieces everywhere. McQueen worked out of a studio the size of a cupboard and showed his second collection, Nihilism, in a warehouse with a dirt floor. The clothes were brutal. Tailoring fractured at the seams. Trousers sat so low the models had to hold them up. There was a dress made from hospital slides of disease and decay, backlit so the fabric glowed. The press called it unwearable. McQueen called it honest.

The Row and the Razor

What made McQueen dangerous was not his taste for provocation. It was his technical fluency. A jacket from his 1995 collection Highland Rape — the one that made his name and nearly ended his career — is still a masterclass in construction. The shoulders are roped and pulled forward. The waist is suppressed to the point of distortion. The cloth, a houndstooth tweed, is cut on the bias so it moves like jersey. You can wear it. You can move in it. It does not forgive poor posture.

This is what the Row taught him. A suit is architecture. It holds the body and shapes it. McQueen took that principle and turned it inside out. His tailoring did not flatter. It confronted. A jacket from The Hunger in 1996 had sleeves that stopped at the elbow, forcing the wearer to hold her arms at odd angles. A coat from It's a Jungle Out There the same year had a collar that rose to the ears and fell to the waist in a single unbroken line. The pattern work alone would have taken a Savile Row cutter three days. McQueen did it in an afternoon.

He worked fast because he had to. Alexander McQueen, the brand, ran on fumes and overdrafts until Gucci Group bought a fifty-one per cent stake in 2000. By then McQueen had shown fourteen collections, won British Designer of the Year four times, and been appointed head designer at Givenchy, a job he took for the money and loathed for the constraints. Givenchy wanted refinement. McQueen gave them a collection inspired by geishas and called it Eclect Dissect. Givenchy wanted restraint. McQueen sent out models in antlers and leather harnesses. He lasted five years.

What Remains

The maison today is not the maison McQueen built. It cannot be. He died in February 2010, the week before his autumn collection was due to show. Sarah Burton, who had worked beside him since 1996, took over as creative director. She has been there since.

Burton understands the house codes because she helped invent them. The low-slung bumster trousers. The exaggerated shoulders. The lace that looks like it is growing out of the fabric rather than applied to it. But her work is quieter. Where McQueen used tailoring as a weapon, Burton uses it as armour. Her jackets are still sharp, still structured, but they do not antagonise. A coat from her spring 2023 collection has the same roped shoulder McQueen favoured, but the lapel is softer. The skirt falls instead of flaring. It is a garment you could wear to a meeting, then to dinner, then to bed if you were too tired to take it off.

This is not a criticism. It is a fact. Alexander McQueen, the man, made clothes for women who wanted to be seen and did not care if they were liked. Alexander McQueen, the house, makes clothes for women who have meetings in the morning and cannot afford to be dismissed. The tailoring is still there. The cutting is still precise. But the rage is gone.

Some of that is Burton. Some of it is Kering, the conglomerate that now owns the house outright. Kering wants growth. Growth requires product. Product requires consistency. You cannot build a handbag business on raw seams and hospital slides. You can build it on structured leather and recognisable hardware, which is what the maison has done. The Jewelled Satchel, introduced in 2016, is now a top-ten seller. It has nothing to do with McQueen's vision and everything to do with keeping the atelier employed.

The Jacket That Never Was

There is a jacket in the Alexander McQueen archive that was never produced. McQueen cut it in 2009 for a collection that was never shown. It is made from a black wool so fine it feels like silk. The shoulders are built up with layers of horsehair and canvas, then pulled forward so the chest collapses inward. The waist is taken in by six inches. The sleeves are set so far back the wearer has to reach to close the buttons. It is, by any measure, unwearable.

Burton will not produce it. She has said, in interviews, that McQueen's archive is not a resource to be mined but a record to be respected. This is wise. It is also convenient. The jacket would not sell. It would not photograph well. It would not translate to ready-to-wear, which is where the money is. But it is also the clearest expression of what McQueen believed a jacket could do. It could hold you. It could hurt you. It could make you impossible to ignore.

The maison still makes jackets. They are beautiful. They are well-cut. They sell. But they do not do what that jacket does. They do not demand anything. And that, more than the name or the atelier or the archive, is what has been lost.

McQueen once said, in an interview with The Independent in 1997, that he did not want to make clothes that made women feel comfortable. He wanted to make clothes that made them feel powerful, even if power was uncomfortable. Burton has spent fourteen years making the house comfortable with itself. It is a reasonable strategy. It is a profitable strategy. It is not what McQueen would have done.

But McQueen is not here. What remains is a house that knows how to cut a sleeve and balance a shoulder and move product. It is more than most designers leave behind. It is less than he deserved.