The real McQueen

Yes, he was a complex genius, and Lee the man was indivisible from Alexander the designer. In 20 years, I never quite felt comfortable with the way he would cut clothes with me in them, the scissors a skin cell away from a permanent scar. But Lee was my love, my great defender and my friend. People who have been hurt are like birds — they flock together. We loved each other. I felt him before me, behind me and at my side. It was as if we were married. For want of a better word, he was my gay husband. Even through our other relationships, we two had an enduring, ideal platonic love.

We met through Isabella Blow. The first thing she ever said to me was: “You’ve got to come and meet this designer. He’ll love you.” It was 1993. There was no Google to run his name through. I had no idea who Alexander McQueen was.

While it took us five years to become truly best friends, the minute blue eyes met brown in his first Hoxton studio, we both knew, “Here is my soulmate.” The first thing he said to me, however, was rather less romantic. “Wow! You’re so skinny. Don’t let her outside, she’ll fall down the drain.”

The first time we shared a bed together was after the first McQueen show in Paris [The Dance of the Twisted Bull, SS02]. We were in his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, where he always stayed, and the bellboys started filing in with mountains of pillows. What the hell was going on? I was summoned to the bedroom, where he had erected a high wall of pillows down the bed, all overlaid, like a proper bricklayer. “Really?” I said. “Well, you never know,” Lee said.

I had a bedroom in every house he owned. We shared a dog, Juice. We went on holidays together: skiing in Cervinia, near Milan, after the menswear shows, Verbier at new year, diving in the Maldives every summer. We were born two weeks apart in March 1969.

Lee knew I had been through some struggles and dark times, but he didn’t mind scars, mental or physical; he liked them. The show he did with the amputee athlete Aimee Mullins [No 13, SS99] wasn’t for shock value. He thought of her as a unique individual with beauty and strength. Lee saw beauty where other people could not see it. His compassion for a person, particularly for women, when they had gone through the mill was matched only by his passion to show them in their full strength.

When I returned to London from New York after an unpleasant divorce, he dedicated his “fire” show to me [Joan, AW98]. “Which name do you want me to use?” I told him my own, my maiden name, Neilson. “Good! Thought so.” Lee didn’t want me hanging on to anything I didn’t need.

There are so many stories about Lee’s kindness. Everything stopped when he knew someone who worked with him or who he loved was suffering. I saw it happen with Anne [Deniau, his backstage photographer, who shot the picture on the previous page] when her son was very ill. She insisted on working, but was also, understandably, in pieces. As soon as he realised this, he kicked everyone out — bear in mind, this was in Paris, moments before the Givenchy couture show was due to start — to spend time with her.

With five brothers and sisters, Lee had a few nieces and nephews. Some of those kids had kids, too, and he loved them all. He was the fun, sparkly, blue-eyed uncle, who, for all the cheeky laughter and avuncular joking, had a genuine concern that they should all get a proper education and learn a craft. Lee, more than anyone, knew the value of that.

It was overwhelming, the year I joined a full-on, boisterous McQueen family Christmas at the house he had bought his parents outside London. Joyce, his mum, at the centre of it all, was the epitome of the East End matriarch and the real love of Lee’s life. Usually we spent Christmas alone together, often at his house in Hastings. By the sea, close to nature, Lee found so much of his inspiration. Friends and family would come and go, for the night, for a meal, but mostly it was just us two and the dogs.

The three dogs were his children. Minter was his first. He came from Battersea and was a chatty mutt. Lee’s affectionate “Oh shut up, Minter” was almost a catchphrase. Juice was his first pedigree English bull terrier and was the apple of his eye. When Lee left, Juice came to live with me. Callum was his second pedigree, and best described as Lee’s handsome son. Callum was such a beautiful boy, but he didn’t like anyone except Lee. I was, at best, “OK, I suppose”, tolerated; Lee’s boyfriends, less so.

There is a portrait of Lee by the photographer Sean Ellis, taken for The Face magazine in 1998. Lee had it up in every house he lived in, because he felt it was an image of who he was at that time. In it, he is dressed as a knight, helmet off, and bloodied at the end of the battle. It’s my favourite picture of him: victorious, he has taken on the world and won.

Lee was fighting battles from the moment he was born. As a baby in a big, loving family, he had to fight for space and attention. He knew from a young age he was gay, which was hard enough in 20th-century Britain, but especially so in an East End working-class culture.

When it came to work, he was not always the golden boy. While Issie Blow and Suzy [Menkes] were there from the outset, there were a lot of people who weren’t. He’d been to Vogue House and told he couldn’t come back. I don’t know what he did — ran up to all these women going “Boo”, I imagine. So Issie had to sneak him in under the cover of darkness if they were working together. Yes, there was always a battle, and those battles were often with the fashion establishment. He constantly fought for change, be it at McQueen or Givenchy, or going into ownership with Tom Ford and Gucci Group. There wasn’t a time when he wasn’t battling. To be honest, he believed that most people in his industry were idiots. The powers that be hailed him as a genius, but the ultimate line was always the bottom one.

Don’t get me wrong, Lee knew business. He never said, “You run it, and I’ll design it.” It’s more that the conflict between the creative and fashion’s ever more corporate nature was a constant source of anguish for him. I know Lee thought of himself as an artist and a designer. He could be quite disdainful of other designers.

When he was going through the process of creating, it seemed to be hard. There were moments, though, when I knew something amazing was going to happen. On a holiday in Thailand, we had adjoining rooms. I went in to have breakfast with him, but the room was empty. There were 12 pieces of paper on the table, all with the same simple sketch, almost like a tailor’s dummy, but then I got to the last sheet and there was the first dress from the Plato’s Atlantis show [SS10], and it was perfect. It literally took my breath away — a tingle ran through my body, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. This was going to be one of his most amazing shows. He walked in. I looked up at him. I said: “It’s perfect.” He just smiled.

On holiday, after shows, he would let go. Packing for his first ski trip with me, he emailed the looks he had put together for each day and night. “This OK?” “What about this one?” He was a perfectionist at all times.

In the pool when we were on holiday, there was always a moment when he would say, “All right, I’m going to do it for you.” I would scream: “No, NO! You’re not. Really!” He would start his synchronised-swimming routine, sculling around, then a leg would pop up, an elegant arm. All the while, I would be gasping and laughing, until he popped up in his final, perfect frozen smile pose, while I would clap and cry, “Again, again...”

He was in the synchronised-swimming squad at school, the only boy among 20 or more girls. I was never allowed to tell anyone he did it for me; it was just one of those things we did together.

Lee didn’t complete his last show [AW10] before he left. Sarah Burton finished it for him. His mood board was covered in pictures of purgatory, Dante’s Inferno and work by the Chapman Brothers. There was also a poem by Edgar Allan Poe that included both our names, Annabel Lee, which he had found and loved. It’s about a love so strong it reaches across the grave. We read it together a lot: me to him, him to me; it was another one of those things we did together. “And neither the angels in Heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul, Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”

Years ago, Lee said to me: “If I ever leave you, you will know what this world is really like.” It was just a casual thought at the time. Nobody could have known then the enormous weight those words would carry now.

Towards the end, what Lee really hated was this sense of a ticking Doomsday clock, of intolerance and religious fervour. Growing up gay and Catholic, he felt unaccepted by God. He was full of questions about religion — it was something he returned to again and again in his work. In daily life, too, it would creep in. It always surprised me that he mumbled Catholic prayers to himself when he thought it might help, like the time he lost his car keys on the beach and came running toward me when he found them, whooping: “St Andrew, patron saint of lost things.”

In his collections, he told stories, beautiful stories, and yet, despite all the thought, the passion and intellect that he put into each show, sometimes all he could see were the faces of painted women, the silhouette of a suit and an audience waiting for just another dress. I hope the many people who will go to see the Savage Beauty exhibition at the V&A can see beyond just another dress.

For me, writing anything about Lee is like having a conversation with him. The raw anguish I felt for years after he left is manageable now, but still I miss him more than words can express and am thankful for his incredible love and friendship.

I wanted to be photographed with a kestrel because it was a bird he loved and admired. If I imagined him coming back as anything, it would be a kestrel.