In The Presence of McQueen

 

I shook off my nerves and approached an open door. Inside was a woman with a paintbrush tucked into her hair and another in her hand.

It was Daphne.

She was wearing a short gold kimono with gold-leaf details and an enormous statement necklace in the shape of a scorpion. The theatricality of her appearance contrasted beautifully with the softness of her manner. Her voice was gentle, sweet and curious. She genuinely wanted to know about me.

I, of course, wanted to know everything about her.

Eventually, our conversation turned to Alexander McQueen, or Lee, as she called him.

At one point, she disappeared into her closet and returned with unfinished garments that Lee had never completed. Seeing them felt strangely intimate. These weren't McQueen pieces perfectly preserved beneath museum lighting. They were unfinished things touched by a person Daphne had known and loved, a glimpse of the man behind the mythology.

She later described in Harper's Baazar-"One of the most striking things about the way she talks about him is that fashion apparently occupied very little of their friendship. Reflecting on Savage Beauty at the Met, Guinness said that only about 1% of their time together was spent talking about clothes; the other 99% was about their private lives. Seeing his work assembled after his death therefore affected her profoundly because she felt she was almost discovering this enormous part of him anew."

That distinction fascinated me.

To the rest of us, he was Alexander McQueen: the provocateur, the visionary, the designer responsible for some of fashion's most unforgettable images.

To Daphne, he was Lee.

Our conversation eventually wandered away from fashion again and into music. Daphne described herself to me as a "hippy '60s child—rock 'n' roll," before talking about her admiration for David Bowie. It felt entirely appropriate. Shakespeare, McQueen, Bowie, art, music—the conversation moved freely between worlds, much like Daphne herself.

Before I left, she graciously signed my copy of Savage Beauty. To this day, it remains one of my most treasured possessions—not simply because Daphne Guinness signed it, but because of the afternoon attached to it.

So when I learned that LACMA would be presenting Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse, I knew I had to see it. And when my Canadian friend Anna planned a visit so we could experience the exhibition together, the anticipation became even greater.

I was going to encounter McQueen again—but this time through the work itself.

And perhaps that is what continues to fascinate me most about fashion. A garment can outlive its moment. It can preserve an idea, an emotion, even a person. Years later, standing before McQueen's work, I wasn't simply looking at clothes.

I was stepping back into his world.

Los Angeles can make you feel as though you’re forever chasing a life that stays just out of reach. Wealth and deprivation share the same streets, each in full view of the other. The sunshine is relentless, even darkness offers little cover. There’s always something burning through it: a lone streetlamp, the city’s glow against the hills, a hellishly bright September moon.

Yet the city that exhausts you can also hold you spellbound. 

There are long summer nights when the lights seem to shimmer just for you. Castle-like homes watch from the hills, their windows suggesting lives you can only imagine. On an empty freeway, one road slips into another until the familiar becomes strange. For a moment, you could be somewhere else entirely, another city, another landscape, another time. These versions of Los Angeles are inseparable. Its beauty does not erase its brutality. Sometimes it makes that brutality harder to comprehend.

Perhaps that’s why the city feels like a fitting setting for an exhibition devoted to Alexander McQueen. His work understood the uneasy power of things that don’t belong together and do. Beauty could frighten. Romance could turn macabre. Splendor could carry the suggestion of decay. Like Los Angeles, McQueen could seduce you before you fully understood what you were seeing. By the time you looked again, the beauty had already unsettled you.