Alexander McQueen
Alexander McQueen
Lee Alexander McQueen, CBEwas a British fashion designer and couturier. He is known for having worked as chief designer at Givenchy from 1996 to 2001 and for founding his own Alexander McQueen label. His achievements in fashion earned him four British Designer of the Year awards, as well as the CFDA's International Designer of the Year award in 2003. McQueen committed suicide in 2010 at the age of forty...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionFashion Designer
Date of Birth17 March 1969
CityLondon, England
I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.
I hate it when people romanticize Scotland.
I'm about what goes through people's minds. The stuff that people don't want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what's buried in people's psyches.
Having money hasn't changed me. If anything it's made my life worse. People come up to you who knew you before you were famous and who didn't come up to you before. I'm a clever designer. I can do what the client wants. But I'm prepared to forget about money if it affects my creativity because, remember, I started off with nothing. And I can do that again.
I don’t want to do a cocktail party. I’d rather people left my shows and vomited.
I never look at other people's work. My mind has to be completely focused on my own illusions.
I like the concept of dressing people. I used to not care whether people bought the clothes or not, but I kind of like it now. I wouldn't label that commercialism; it's more like I do this work because I want people to wear it.
I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.
I work with people I admire and respect. It's never because of who they are.
When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there’s a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful. It kind of fends people off.
People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don't see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.
If you ask any lady they want to be taller, they want to be slimmer, you know, and they want a waist. I'm not here to make people look like a sack of potatoes.
It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.
For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.