“You have always made the most beautiful things out of absolute shit.” This is Darrah Cloud’s favourite line in her new play about Alexander McQueen, dubbed the bad boy or enfant terrible of British fashion.
“It’s what he did,” Cloud explains via Zoom from New York. “He had the ability to translate trauma into beauty or joy into beauty or an oyster shell into a dress. I mean, what an extraordinary thing.”
House of McQueen, opening off Broadway on 9 September, explores how McQueen, a taxi driver’s son from working-class London, rose to the top of the fashion industry with a combination of provocative spectacle and flawless craftsmanship.
Cloud adds: “He’s like an analogue person in a coming digital world. The oyster dress still has his DNA on it, I’m sure, because he sewed it himself. It’s not like he sent the design off to Japan and had them make it in a factory. A lot of the fashions are one of a kind because of that.”
The young Lee McQueen – he later switched to his middle name, Alexander, because it sounded posh – left school at 16 and apprenticed as a tailor on Savile Row, where legend has it he scrawled obscenities inside the lining of a jacket destined for Prince Charles.
McQueen pursued a master’s degree at the prestigious art and design college Central Saint Martins, where his graduation collection, inspired by Jack the Ripper, was bought by the fashion stylist Isabella Blow, who became his patron and mentor.
His early collections caused shock waves. In Highland Rape, dishevelled models staggered down the runway with their Scottish-inspired clothing ripped to expose breasts and nether regions. He said: “I don’t want a show where you come out feeling like you’ve just had Sunday lunch. I want you to come out either feeling repulsed or exhilarated.”
In 1996 McQueen got his big break, becoming chief designer at Givenchy, where he clashed with the constraints of a heritage house but produced memorable, sometimes unsettling shows.
He founded his own label, Alexander McQueen, that grappled with death, nature, folklore, and the tension between beauty and horror. His theatrical runway shows included a model encased in a glass box surrounded by butterflies, robotic spray-painting on the catwalk and holographic projections of Kate Moss.
He won four British Designer of the Year awards and a CBE in 2003. But he struggled with mental health and substance abuse and killed himself at the age of 40.
House of McQueen stars Luke Newton, best known for playing Colin in Netflix’s Bridgerton, as McQueen and Emily Skinner as his mother, Joyce McQueen. The show is executive-produced by Rick Lazes while Gary James McQueen, the designer’s nephew, serves as creative director.
Cloud was approached to write the script in January 2020, and having been awed by the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, had no hesitation about jumping on board. “I wanted to do it immediately because I didn’t know much about Lee. I was eager to dive into how he did this and where this all came from.
“As a fellow artist spending a life trying to fix the world with my writing, I related to his struggle, to his having been born in the East End of London. He wasn’t supposed to get out of that neighbourhood yet he did.
“He did it by believing in himself. Joyce McQueen had a lot to do with that. She plays a big role in the play. I related to the story, I related to his anger, I related to the things that inspired him and how he worked through that.”
She adds: “That struggle between art and commerce was lifelong for him and painful. He was a person who did wear his heart on his sleeve. I love people like that. Those people who feel that deeply are gems, are treasures.”
Using a non-linear narrative structure, and enhanced by floor-to-ceiling LED panels, House of McQueen considers the mentors, collaborators, and peers who had a profound influence on McQueen’s life and boundary-pushing career.
“He wasn’t alone. He was nurtured. He was nurtured by a fabulous mum, a supportive but difficult household. Support and appreciation come in different styles. A difficult father might just be your biggest fan. I guess I want people to walk away going ‘what a loss’ and ‘what a great artist’ and understanding what it takes to make great art.”
The show’s director, Sam Helfrich, says these interactions form a “landscape of memory” of people who “caused him great pain and heartache and guilt and tragedy” but also provided “moments of beauty, moments of joy, moments of fantasy”.
Helfrich says: “They’re all people who could have easily said, ‘I’m not interested in you,’ and the whole thing would have come to a halt. But one after another after another there are these people in this world who see something.
“That’s where the magic comes in. What do they see with a piece of cloth in their hands? What did they see with some punky kid standing before them asking for a job? These are important moments. Making those into theatrical moments was interesting to me.”
Even so, McQueen’s move to France and relationship with the fashion house Givenchy was tumultuous. Helfrich reflects: “That exchange between art and commerce, the struggle to be an artist and also to make money and serve the needs of people like the House of Givenchy or Gucci, is all part of the mix.
“Lee didn’t always make perfect decisions. There’s a scene in the play where he meets Tom Ford and that’s a very complicated scene. It’s a scene where for the audience, you leave the scene thinking, ’Was that the right decision, was that the right thing to do? Is that a compromise? Did he just somehow diminish himself as an artist? Or maybe he didn’t.’ It’s a complicated scene where you think maybe Lee’s not always perfect and doesn’t always treat people nicely either.”
At the end of his life, two deaths devastated McQueen. Blow took her life in 2007 and, in early 2010, McQueen’s beloved mother died. Only days later – on the eve of her funeral – the designer killed himself after taking drugs. The play does not seek to draw firm conclusions about his motivation.
Helfrich says: “It’s easy for all of us to be armchair psychologists and say these are the reasons why. But hopefully the play presents a more complicated portrait than that and doesn’t end on an obvious ‘Oh, well, it was inevitable,’ because by the time you get to that point in the play we don’t want it to happen: there’s too many great things going on right now so this can’t be happening. That’s what I want people to think.”
Helfrich regards the show as “a theatrical event and not a biography” and drew on deep experience in directing opera productions in New York, Salzburg and elsewhere. He directed John Adams’ Nixon in China at the Eugene Opera.
He says: “The project does feel operatic in many ways, even though it’s not an opera. It’s got a lot of scope and it’s a big story. It to me is a very Verdi and Shakespearean story in many ways. I was attracted to it for that reason and I think they were attracted to me for the same reason. My thinking is very operatic.”
Cloud, for her part, says her career has been spent making people with seemingly obscure lives into epic heroes. “So it kind of fit with this in the sense that I wanted to concentrate on Lee’s humanity and familiarity as a human,” she explains.
“He’s not this untouchable epic person. He’s a real human being with flaws. He was difficult and he was funny and he was irrational and neurotic and all the things that we all are. I find that heroic.”
House of McQueen is now in previews at the Mansion at Hudson Yards in New York and will open officially on 9 September
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
