In 1994, a down-on-his-luck Lee McQueen was living in a ground-floor flat his sister owned on a public housing estate in Dagenham, still unsure of what a career in fashion could offer someone like him. “I never wanted to be a fashion designer,” the 25-year-old told his old friend John McKitterick at the time. “I wish I could have been a war photographer or something.
” The writer Dana Thomas replays this interaction in her 2015 book Gods And Kings , citing the “introspective” and “frank” mood he was experiencing while building his third collection. And yet – a war photographer? McQueen was existential about lots of things in life, but he was also a known wind-up. This was, after all, the same person planting rumours in the press about Michael Jackson and Karl Lagerfeld attending his shows.
To wit: McQueen lied to a reporter from the Daily Telegraph about the beginnings of that same collection, telling them it was influenced by Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle du Jour in which Catherine Deneuve plays a housewife-turned-prostitute clad in Yves Saint Laurent . “Of course – nothing so predictable,” wrote the fashion historian Judith Watt in her 2012 biography on the late designer. “Instead, he looked to Celtic culture and the Scottish bean sídhe or ‘banshee’ – a fairy from the otherworld, who would be seen washing the blood from clothes of men about to die.
” McQueen presented this work at the Café de Paris in central London on a cast of “re.