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
There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.
I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil.
I am an avid follower of the news, and sometimes you just can't take any more war, any more disasters, and you want to remind yourself there's beauty in the world. I wanted to show a more poetic side to my work. It was all about... a feeling of sadness, but in a cinematic kind of way. I find beauty in melancholy.
I have so much respect for him, and I don't even think he will mind.
I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.
It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.
I find it grotesque when clothes hit you in the face and there's no room for fault. But I don't expect to turn things around all by myself. I'm not a saint.
Nicey nicey just doesn't do it for me.
What we do have in London is a fantastic pool of talent coming through the colleges. We are the fashion world's incubator.
You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don't need to do that any more.
I hate it when people romanticize Scotland.
I want to empower women.
My relationships with producers or photographers - these are relationships that took years.
You find a lot of ideas from my shows in adverts now. I find it a compliment.