Lee Alexander McQueen was born in 1969, the sixth and youngest child of a taxi driver, in the East End of London. He left school at sixteen and apprenticed on Savile Row at Anderson & Sheppard and Gieves & Hawkes — where, reportedly, he was involved in tailoring a suit for Prince Charles. The rumour was that he had sewn obscenities into the lining. The anecdote followed him, and he made productive use of it.

He enrolled at Central Saint Martins in 1992. His MA graduation collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, was bought in full by the stylist Isabella Blow. He was twenty-three.

The 1990s

McQueen's shows between 1994 and 1999 — Highland Rape, Dante, La Poupée, The Overlook — assembled a new vocabulary for fashion as theatre. They combined Savile Row tailoring with pre-industrial symbolism, gothic imagery, and an explicit interest in violence. Highland Rape was controversial; McQueen insisted it referred to the English Clearances of the Scottish Highlands. The interpretation that stuck was both.

“

I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress. — Alexander McQueen

Givenchy

At twenty-seven, McQueen succeeded John Galliano at Givenchy. The four years were, by his admission, his least happy. LVMH required commercial output; McQueen required theatrical freedom. He left in 2001, selling 51% of his own house to the Gucci Group, which funded the next eight years.

The Late Shows

Voss (2001), with Michelle Olley emerging from a mirrored cube; The Horn of Plenty (2009); Plato's Atlantis (2010), with its digital fish-scale dresses and twelve-inch armadillo heels — these constitute the most technically ambitious run of the early 2000s. Plato's Atlantis was live-streamed, the first major show to be, and crashed the server.

Death

McQueen's mother died on 2 February 2010. He killed himself nine days later, on 11 February, aged forty. Sarah Burton, his right hand since 1996, succeeded him and ran the house until 2023. The Met's 2011 retrospective Savage Beauty was attended by 661,509 visitors, the eighth most-attended exhibition in the museum's history. The V&A's London staging in 2015 attracted 493,000. The exhibitions re-established what McQueen had argued: that fashion could be serious, that it could be violent, and that its most serious propositions were delivered theatrically or not at all.