Documentary ‘McQueen’ reveals the sad true life of the fashion icon

ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Executive Editor
jones@dallasvoice.com

High fashion is about fantasy — idealized bodies exuding impossible cool strutting in form-fitting garments that evoke a world you can barely imagine. But not all fantasies are sunny and friendly; some are dark. Some are nightmares.

For Lee Alexander McQueen — Lee to his friends, Alexander to the pages of Vogue and Marie Claire — fantasies were subversive things. He trafficked in a world of beauty but scoured it for the seedy side. Pudgy and with an impenetrable lower class East End accent and the look of a skinhead, McQueen himself was hardly an avatar of haute couture. (Ever notice how many designers appear at the end of their own shows in ill-tailored T-shirts and dad jeans?) And when he began to emerge in the early 1990s, his concept of clothing was some of the most subversive the universe had come upon.

“It was modern and it was classical,” one pundit observes in McQueen, the new documentary about the radical fashionista’s life and work. “It was tradition and it was sabotage. It was beauty and violence.” It was, in sum, everything the ’90s were, writ on fabric.

It can be arresting to realize how little we know about many celebrities — names that instantly evoke images in our mind’s eye, but whose faces, voices and histories we aren’t all that familiar with. (Quick! What did Princess Diana sound like? How tall is Berry Gordy?) McQueen — using grainy cellphone and Super 8 archive footage and old news reports, as well as contemporary interviews (its style quickly recalls another documentary about a troubled Brit, Amy) — looks deep into Lee’s personal life, his relationships, his ambitions, his process. His art was guerrilla-esque, like Basquiat or Banksy or even Pollock or Van Gogh; the only difference is, his medium was clothing.

With the exception of Banksy, all of those artists ended tragically, which also befell Lee; he dealt with a lot of personal loss (family, friends, lovers), including an HIV diagnosis and drug abuse. In some ways, that makes his story almost predictably rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-redemption-to-tragedy; but that doesn’t make his story less poignant nor his creativity less profound; indeed, it could be the exact opposite. Lee was a Roman candle, burning brightly before fading just as the illumination becomes most intense.

“You don’t discover talent; talent is there. You open doors for talent,” a colleague opines. “[But] no one discovered Alexander McQueen — Alexander McQueen discovered himself.” And by the end of his life, what he discovered made living unbearable.

Opens Aug. 3 at the Angelika Film Center Mockingbird Station.