The painful story of Lee Alexander McQueen – his fashion triumph and inner turmoil – has yet another airing. After Savage Beauty, the record-breaking 2011 exhibition of the British designer’s life and art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, now comes a movie.
Produced by Ian Bonhôte and co-directed by him and Peter Ettedgui, McQueen was launched last week in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival and will open in British cinemas on the June 8. It is the most sensitive vision I have seen about a creative who never lost his rough edges, and who put his life – the bloody history of distant warriors in Scotland and childhood abuse within his family – on stage.
Episodes of McQueen’s life, before his death by suicide in February 2010, both exhibit and explain his development as a young and bolshie creator who, in his days as an apprentice on Savile Row, stitched a vulgar motif, supposedly a penis, hidden on the inside of a suit destined for Prince Charles, and who seemed to move with lightning speed from British bad boy to creative director of the Paris couture house of Givenchy.
There are various examples of the designer’s wild side, including collecting dead birds and offering tortuous blocks of footwear in his final and supremely beautiful collection titled “Plato’s Atlantis”. And the film, through interviews with the designer’s family, offers an insider vision – or at least their various points of view.
