In The Presence of McQueen

I love fashion. Much like film, it has the ability to transport me, to another era, another mood, another world entirely.

Alexander McQueen was the kind of designer who understood that power instinctively. His collections didn't simply ask you to look at clothes; they invited you into the worlds he created. They could make you stop and wonder, stop and think, and perhaps even challenge something you thought you understood. There was always a provocateur within McQueen, but beneath the provocation was extraordinary emotion.

Years ago, on a hot July afternoon in Los Angeles, I found myself unexpectedly close to that world when I met one of McQueen's muses and closest friends, Daphne Guinness.

Our conversations began, surprisingly, with Shakespeare. I remember thinking how surreal it was that I was connecting with Daphne Guinness over literature rather than fashion—although, in retrospect, that feels completely fitting for someone as wonderfully curious and culturally layered as she is.

One afternoon, Daphne invited me to her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

With my copy of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty in hand, I walked toward the bungalow still not quite believing this was actually happening. 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 red 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 is the kind of city that can trap you in its unforgiving rat race. Here, homelessness and extraordinary wealth exist almost side by side, unapologetically on full display. The days are relentlessly sunny and the light feels endless. Even on the darkest nights, something is illuminated—a lonely streetlamp, the glow of the city against the hills, or a hellishly bright September full moon hanging overhead.

And yet, alongside the beastly realities of Los Angeles, there is another version of the city.

There are the long summer nights and glittering city lights; castle-like homes peering down from the starry hills; and those endless nighttime drives when one freeway folds into another and suddenly you feel as though you've been transported somewhere else entirely—a different city, a different landscape, perhaps even a different time.

It feels particularly fitting, then, that Los Angeles—a city built upon such extreme contradictions—would become the setting for an exhibition dedicated to Alexander McQueen.

Because contradiction was part of McQueen's language, too.

Beauty could be frightening. Romance could become macabre. History could collide with the future. A woman could appear impossibly delicate and, at the same time, completely armored. His work never seemed interested in beauty simply for beauty's sake. It asked you to look at something beautiful and then look again.