Fashion Designer & Pattern Cutter
Born St. Patrick's Day, 1969, East-End London.
Where Jack the Ripper Roamed. Post-Blitz.
Loved his mother. And to get a rise out of you.
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Master of PATTERN CUTTING
and creating forms for the female figure.
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90S Collections
Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (x)
Taxi Driver (X)
Nihlism (x)
Banshee (x)
The Birds (x)
HIGHLAND RAPE (X)
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© Kin Ho www.kinho.com / National Portrait Gallery, London
On a TV program about the lack of apprentices on Savile Row, Lee's mom had the idea for him to give it a go and work there.
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McQueen knew Romeo Gigli was the only designer he wanted to work for. He met Carla Sozzani and him in Milano. Gigli liked his Saville Row experience & hired him to start the following day at Corso Como, 10.
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CV
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Anderson & Sheppard - pattern cutting & technique
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Gieves & Hawkes - men's trousers
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Bermans & Nathans - theatre16th cent patterns
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Romeo Gigli - power of narratives & archetypes
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No. 30 Savile Row HIRING
Monday - Thursday 8:30-17:00pm
£ 100 / week
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MapCarte 134/365: Savile Row by Katherine Baxter, 2006 Original
Inspired by Jack the Ripper. 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini's adaptation), Victorian Pornography, Fetishism. The Collection's program read: "Day into evening wear ... inspired by nineteenth-century street walkers."
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MUSIC: HOUSE
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OPENING LOOK: "high-waisted and skin tight dark red satin peg trousers. paired with: black asymmetrical bandeau top & long ropes of tiny black beads.
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OTHER LOOKS AS DESCRIBED BY DANA THOMAS:
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sheer black chiffon sleeveless shirt over a black bra and black double-layer chiffon pencil skirt. hemmed with goose feathers and the Simon Costin Neckpiece of black feathers and bone
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fashion magazine hoop skirt and black satin frock coat, with ductal-like derriere,worn over a naked torso and loosely tied below the breasts
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a sleeveless blood red and black feather tunic worn as a micro minidress with torn sheer stockings. a tailcoat made of pink satin printed with black thorn branches worn with a black bra and black satin trousers
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a black satin tailcoat lined with red satin worn over a naked torso with black satin tuxedo trousers trimmed with sparking red beads
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a sheer black feathery sleeveless top with an open back and feathery peg trousers
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a wasp waist black coat with 3D peplum over a scarlet pencil skirt. this peplum, no one thought he could make it physically work - he did
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Lee's first use of the concept of memento mori : mourning jewelry, skulls, jackets lined with human hair
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Simon Costin Taxidermy Jewelry worn in the collection
MARCH 1993 // THE RITZ LONDON
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Lee McQueen found a poster of DeNiro after he shaves his head in Taxi Driver. He and Simon Ungless printed it on grey taffeta for the Taxi Driver collection. ​
Although there are no photos of this collection, you can visualize what lee did:
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collection included latex to coat the edges of fabric instead of sewing a traditional hem and Lee used exposed zippers (which he learned from McKitterick)
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with a sheer plastic tank top made from a shower curtain which had pheasant tail feathers sandwiched inside with an Elizabethan collar attached to the bustier that was made of feathers
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and tailored Angora Palazzo pants, trousers cut just above the ankle in 1950s style, and 'Korean-Line' frock coats with Chesterfield collars
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introduced the Bumster, which revealed 'a very underexposed erogenous zone' and was the first time since the Mini Skirt (Mary Quant) that a new line was created
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Lee's interest in Victorian era was demonstrated by a corseted wooden riding jacket and skirt printed with August Sander photographs
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His interest in Revolutionary France was demonstrated by the couture coat made from silk suiting with pleated and jewelled collar. He sliced the spine at the center to reveal the wearer's spine. He named it The Scarlet Pimpernel
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18-OCTOBER 1993 // @BLUEBIRD GARAGE
"He accepted the brutality of human nature, didn't try to suppress it. He didn't want to put women on a pedestal like untouchable, unreachable goddesses. He wanted to empower them and help them use the force of their sexuality to its fullest." - Gods and Kings by Dana Thomas
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Where? The Bluebird Garage on the King's Road in Chelsea
You were invited? You mean you weren't? McQueen even sent the show invitations with pages torn from an encyclopaedia that were hand-stamped with the date & venue
The Music: Nirvana, L7's Pretend We're Dead, Cyprus Hill's I wanna Get High
Why Nihilism?
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McQueen was obsessed with Hussein Chalayan's The Tangent Flows graduate collection. Chalayan made silk dresses and buried them in his backyard for weeks to decay. McQueen wanted to take his idea and do it better
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Lee was studying natural disasters: floods, fire, drought, and how after their destruction, they created virginal landscapes where new life could be born.
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Unless and Lee played with ageing clay on a white draped chiffon dress
So he was experimenting?
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LM was experimenting with cling film. He was using it to protect the dress from experiments with mud, liquid latex, and he discovered he could simply shape the garment on a model, cut the material and add a zipper.
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OK well how was it ?
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wanted to cover the dress in locusts as if the person was bbeing devoured -- ungless sewed them on one by one
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An Edwardian jacket in corroded gilt and a frock coat with matching trousers made from cheap gold fabric, tarnished by chemicals that burned through the fibres
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McQueen was mindful to build his brand, his name appearing as a logo across the bust of a white shift dress
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Tiina Laakkonen: "There were no fittings. You'd just show up and he's say, ' i want you to wear this and i want you to wear that," and we had to wear our own shoes because he didn't have any. There was no concept of a "show" - it was just completely raw and homecooked.'
26-february 1994 // @Café de Paris
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BANSHEE: McQueen's models in this collection were 'no banshees of the deep'. Inspired to be the antithesis of the banshee spirit of Gaelic mythology who would cry wailing while washing the blood-stained clothes of men approaching violent deaths. A story of romance with a dash of death.
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Other inspirations include Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967) and Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait (1434)
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Looks:
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moulded plaster breast plates, inspired by greek sculptures
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sharp tailoring on black silk suits with elflike shoulders
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skinny sleeves and sliced open armpits
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sailor-inspired jackets with flared cuffs and gold piping
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empire waistlines
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flowing tulle ball skirts
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mixing hard and soft / constricted & f l o w I n g
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dresses had high cleric-like collards or elizabethan-style scoop necklines
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wide cuffs and bustlines trimmed with swooping gold cord-like ecclesiastical robbes
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the bumster signature
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newly the cuntster
Key Looks
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Get Your Tits Out : Julien Macdonald used transparent fishing line for knitting. McQueen thought it was hilarious and drew up a quick sketch of a sweater with transparent vertical panels, he said it reminded him of a club look
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Frock coat in black taffeta: Ungless poured resin over it - creating the dripping effect of black glass. 'the hem and sleeves had shards of resin hanging off them. it was totally beautiful' - Ungless
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Tizer Bailey wore the Cuntsters and she stoped to pose for photographers, lifted her tunic, licked her finger and pretended to stick it in her vagina before walking off. the music pounded 'Am I a bitch? Yes! Am I a whore? No! You wanna fuck? Let's go!'
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10-SEPTEMBER 1995 // BAGLEY'S WAREHOUSE, LONDON
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"Birds, road, car tire, splat!" he said with his goofy laugh
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Inspired by McQueen's favourite Hitchcock film from 1963, The Birds. In the movie, thousands of vicious birds arrive to attack humans.
McQueen was inspired by the pencil skirts that Melanie (played by Tippi Hedren) wore. He noted how they were sleek, feminine 1950s silhouettes that he wanted to make more extreme.
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Simon Ungless said, "Tippi is made vulnerable through the hobbling effect of her clothes in the movie - this beautiful, sexy woman placed into a different environment and put at extreme risk but winning in the end. All very McQueen."
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Roadkill is another theme: McQueen chose to interpret the 'complete chaos and human vulnerability in the face of nature gone wrong' in the collection
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Ungless designed the tire-track print that they printed across the finished garments
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A real life inspiration was a story from a friend involving a personal ad in the papers. He visited a typical home in the South London Suburbs where he was promptly wrapped from head to toe in plastic wrap. "obviously, I could have been chopped up and murdered, but the house and the setting was so provincial that it never crossed my mind' Andrew Groves said. This was the type of story McQueen found wacko and inspiring. McQueen took silk and cut a neck hole, wound thread around it, poured laytex on it, slashed it down the back, and finished it off with a zipper.
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In this collection, McQueen gained a lot of notoriety. He was becoming famous and he felt this. He was worried "it's getting to the point where I'm not doing it because I enjoy it but because it's what is expected." ​
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"England's Rape of Scotland" is how to describe the murderous rampages by England who brutally pushed the Scottish from their land to the coastal regions, to make way for the farming and agricultural projects run by the British. Something, historians have called ethnic cleansing.
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McQueen's family had Scottish roots. And he ​found that John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood were creating flashy cliché costumes using the Scottish tartan. He wanted to create a collection in the vrai history of Scotland.
Of course, he had a mix of inspirations. Perfume: Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, a novel about a perfume apprentice who is born without a body smell and he stalks and murders virgins in search of his perfect scent.
A deeply personal tradgedycited as an inspiration - McQueen recounted to Danan a woman in his life when he was young who was raped (McQueen himself having experienced a similar tradegy) and the horror of that affected him greatly - all of his colections are autobiographical
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Catwalk - covered in dried thistles, heather, leaves and moss
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Invitation - image of a 5inch brown-yellow gash in human flesh pocked with suture scabs
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tartan to construct complicated dressed based on traditional Scottish attire with bustles and crinoline skirts, modern suits with sculpted plunging necklines and bumster trousers or skirts
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every seam - no matter how complicated the cut, mcQueen made sure the plaid matched perfectly!!!!
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Lace - Lee bought for £1.50 a yard from an old wooden cart on Berwick. He sprayed it with metallic car paint to create color and texture (this technique would not work for long as he would eventually need to use actual fashion and couture techniques to bring his vision to life)
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Ungless had a print which looked like melting flowers that mcQueen turned into a sleeveless fitted shift and printed it on tartan for a jacket and shirt
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colors: royal blue, periwinkle, bronze, ivy green and lavender
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mid-calf pencil bumster skirt in lavendar silk held together with gaffer tape - a nod to a crazy night out
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bleached a pair of navy bumsters to look like it had been ripped open during a sexual attack
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Julien Macdonald did knitwear again - inspired by a wound Lee had. It was a long sleeve pullover made of scarlet yarn and clear fishing line that looks like a torso ripped apart - slashed of red across a nude body with threads dangling like dropping blood
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Shaun Leane - created jewelry - silver chains that were attached front through the back of the pencil skirts on the runway at the crotch
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Suzy Menkes came to visit mcQueen before the show - she. got down on her hands and knees to look at the bumsters. She said "ok, i see what you've done" and after that, she was a mcqueen supporter. Recently, another reporter stated the bumster was all for "titilation" - clearly not, girl
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McQueen receive £10,000 from a British health association for their 'Put Smoking Out of Fashion' campaign. He totally forgot he was supposed to create one look for them. Backstage, in a hurry, he smeared glue onto a pair of latex hot pants and poured an ashtray of butts onto it - viola!
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Instructions for the models: "Give the audience the finger. Be rude. Don't be afraid. Show your bum. Stick out your boos."
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The setting: On each seat was a note: "The Scottish Highlands have been of great inspiration to many designers in the past. But they have been romanticised all too often. There were swathes of tartan but only as protection against the elements. Protection proved not to be enough against the fury of soldiers as in many placed and at many times across the world.
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Messy Hair by Colin Roy
People and the press were absolutely outraged. they were furious and shocked and thought Lee was a terrible person. "Rape victims staggering in dressed clawed at the breast were a sick joke, as were the knitted dresses [mass fashion retailers] would make better for a fraction price".
McQueen responded: 'People were so unintelligent they thought this was about women being raped. Highland Rape was about England's rape of Scotland. even though the press 'crucified me for it, I'm glad I did it. The British killed families, kids, children, everything. It's happened. to everyone in the world- it's happening in Croatia now, it happened to gays and lesbians in World War II"
Groves saw it as another interpretation of McQueen's life on the runway Jack the Ripper was about his family, Taxi Driver, his father, and Highland Rape about him.
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Look 19
N I N E T E E N
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T W E N T Y T H R E E
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T W E N T Y F O U R
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T W E N T Y S I X
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S E V E N T Y TWO
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Links to get lost in:
Reckoning with Highland Rape on the Runway PDF
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