Alexander McQueen was many things to many people: a genius; a puerile provocateur; a young upstart who became Givenchy’s head designer when he was just 27 years old; “masochistic and insecure and unhappy and [with] very low self-esteem”; a man with a “wicked sense of humour” who cared deeply for his family; a self-confessed “big-mouthed east London yob”. Curiously for Adam Curtis, he was also an astute observer of the ways in which Britain had been corrupted by the turn of the 21st century.
Shifty, Curtis’s latest series for the BBC, is a hallucinatory study of Britain’s backwaters over the last 40 years. In his signature style, seemingly disparate archival footage is woven together to narrate with devastating lucidity the story of how one of democracy’s tenets – a shared sense of reality – was dismantled by Margaret Thatcher’s free-market ideology and neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualism. In Curtis’s telling, democracy didn’t so much collapse as dissolve into paranoia and political distrust – something that, he believes, was understood by McQueen.
In one scene, Curtis unexpectedly invokes McQueen’s iconic 2001 Spring/Summer show “Voss”, calling it a dramatisation of the “modern illusion of freedom that [McQueen] had helped to create”. He means this not as condemnation. Rather, McQueen is cast as a kind of cultural diagnostician, a man who knew that beneath the sleek surface of late-Nineties Britain was something feral and broken. “Voss” – known colloquially as the asylum show – featured a mirrored glass cube that, when lit from within, resembled a psychiatric ward. Before the show started, the audience sat, forced to look at themselves, for an hour. The models then emerged, stumbling around the box, their faces obscured by bandages. The audience could look in, but the models could not look out. “It’s interaction,” McQueen said, “but also suffocation.”
It’s tempting, and perhaps not entirely wrong, to see McQueen as fashion’s darkest fabulist. But fashion was, for him, a conduit for self-enquiry. “My work is autobiographical,” he said in 2003. Born Lee Alexander McQueen in Lewisham in 1969, he always knew he wanted to be a designer. As a young boy he would dress his older sisters. After dropping out of school aged 16, he went to work as a tailor on Savile Row. From there he unsuccessfully applied for a lecturing job at Central Saint Martins, but was offered a place on the coveted MA course instead. He graduated in 1992, the same year his eponymous line was founded. By 2001 he was churning out up to ten collections a year for both Givenchy and his own label. It’s no wonder the distinction between real and other became blurred.
Violence was never hypothetical for McQueen. His sister, Janet, was beaten so horrifically by her first husband that she miscarried twice. McQueen, from the age of nine, was sexually assaulted by the same man. Savagery, then, wasn’t metaphor, it was memory. And so his fashion became testimony – not to provoke, but to process. His clothes – metal armour, ripped shirts exposing breasts – were both a means of providing protection from the world and evidence one had already endured its cruelty. He knew that the world can be a harsh place for unprotected women. “I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,” he said. Janet became his blueprint: vulnerable but strong. And from her, he built an army.
But McQueen’s vision was not nihilistic. His shows were not about crude violence producing low-grade shock value. It was curious; romantic, even. Nature – bestial, gorgeous, grotesque – was his inspiration: “[It’s] a fabric itself.” It was never mere background; it was a language, and one that he could mimic. He was a keen ornithologist, and the kestrels he spotted around the block of flats opposite his family home in east London were not just birds – they were emblematic of vantage, predation and grace. His models wore exquisite outfits made of razor clams, hats of taxidermied birds and corsets made from 97 aluminium coils.
McQueen understood the cruelty of nature. In Shifty, Curtis uses a clip of McQueen building a dramatic blazer, made from calf hair. A striking silhouette, it has emphasised shoulders contrasted against a cinched-in waist; it became a piece in his 1997 collection, “It’s a Jungle Out There”. Evoking the Thomson’s gazelle, McQueen elucidated in his adenoidal voice: “The gazelle is a poor little critter. But it’s the food chain of Africa. As soon as it’s born, it’s dead. And that’s how I see human life.”
While fragility made half the story, survival made the other. McQueen said about the same blazer, “You could class this as costume. But it’s costume with a deadly meaning.” That’s not to say he didn’t find a place for hope. In his 2009 show “Plato’s Atlantis”, models walked in the now-legendary Armadillo shoe – towering, ten-inch heels. Their heads were adorned in braids, some a foot high, and their bodies bore garments that had used 3D printing to mimic marine features like scales and gills. They emerged onto the catwalk, some nearly eight feet tall, having transformed into something otherworldly. (It’s easy to see how one of his favourite painters, Hieronymus Bosch, informed McQueen’s fantastical sets.) Under McQueen’s gaze, femininity wasn’t merely performative. It was adaptive. Time and again he ensured his women were disquietingly chimeric: part-human, part-beast, mythic. They were not dressing up; they were becoming. Even “Plato’s Atlantis” – the designer’s last collection, unveiled a few months before his death by suicide in February 2010 – often read as apocalyptic, ends in rebirth.
The theatricality of McQueen’s shows was steeped in cinema. He understood voyeurism’s duality: the pleasure of watching, and the terror of being seen. As Richard Brett, a PR who dated McQueen, once said: “He wanted partners he could control, but he was attracted to people who were resistant to that.” One of McQueen’s favourite films was Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders’ ode to estrangement and the erotic pull of memory; a film concerned with how the ghosts of our pasts haunt our present. In it, Nastassja Kinski’s character, Jane, is viewed across the partition of a one-way mirror, by a man who watches silently, and who does not speak until it’s safe. For McQueen, this was not just fiction, it was life itself. The woman in the box. The watcher and the watched. The parallels to Voss are difficult to deny.
In this way, the brutality on display in McQueen’s work was not celebratory – it was diagnostic. It exposed how deeply violence is threaded into the performance of femininity. And through fashion, he rewrote the narrative. His women were not killed, they returned. They were not the romanticised victims seen in Alfred Hitchcock films (another influence on McQueen), but something stranger: survivors, ghosts, predators.
In a world where fashion sells fantasy, McQueen sold a disturbing reality. His work was not cold – it was infused with romantic idealism. “Romance is where my heart is,” he said. Granted, this was something of a complicated and messy concept to McQueen. Speaking about relationships, he said, “You do things like put up your defences just to test how much that other person loves you.” For all the strength and power stitched into his brocade, he left space for vulnerability. He made a cuirass – a breast and back plate fused together, like a medieval knight’s armour, or bulletproof vest – out of glass. His bumster trousers, with their waistband 5cm below those of the Seventies low-rise, were provocative, but they left one of the most vulnerable and erotic parts of his models’ bodies – the bottom of the spine – exposed. His clothes were beautiful, but they were also fragile, and ultimately self-defeating: they left a sliver of a crack for light to break through.
McQueen was, by all accounts, generous, funny, childlike. He loved his dogs. He adored his mum, Joyce. His suicide, which came just nine days after her death, was not just the loss of a great designer – it was the collapse of a unique world-view. It’s easy to romanticise such an ending, to fold it neatly into the narrative of a tortured genius. But McQueen wasn’t interested in being tragic. He wanted truth, even when it hurt, perhaps especially then. In the world of fashion, life can be constructed around fantasy, but he made the audience look at – and reckon with – pain.
Adam Curtis frames McQueen as a man who understood the sickness in Britain’s soul. He certainly understood how beauty could become confinement; how spectacle could be an effective camouflage for pain. By the 2000s, market ideology had reordered the British economy, and New Labour’s spin culture had decoupled politics from reality. The grainy archive film coalesces to form one picture: behind the allure of financial freedom came inequality; beneath superficial beauty lies something murkier. Or, as McQueen put it, “There’s blood beneath every layer of skin.”
But the designer also knew that transformation was possible. “It wasn’t really about fashion with Lee,” said Sarah Burton, who, having joined the Alexander McQueen label as an intern in 1996, succeeded him as head designer. “It was so much more than that. It was about everything that was to do with being alive. All the difficult parts, and the beautiful.” Because while Alexander McQueen’s signature was theatricality, his subject was truth: feral, biographical, unhealed.
[See also: How Britain fell into the K-hole]
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This article appears in the 18 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Warlord