Champagne Supernovas by Maureen Callahan

Author:Maureen Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

The same was true of Isabella. She’d been at loose ends since fall of 1994, when British Vogue sidelined her before sacking her: She was far too mercurial and extravagant and had run up the budget on the now-famous “London Babes” shoot to nearly £80,000. She felt useless. “She would say, ‘I’m so unhappy, I’m so unhappy,’ ” said Plum Sykes. “And I’d say, ‘But what about Detmar? What about this fabulous thousand-acre estate? What about your gorgeous flat in town?’ And she’d say, ‘But Plum, I haven’t got a child.’ ” She’d go by Philip Treacy’s studio and sing her lament: “She would come to visit me and say, ‘You can make hats, and I can’t do anything.’ ”

Isabella kept throwing herself at McQueen, and bullied the esteemed fashion director Michael Roberts, hired by the New Yorker in 1996, to see a show. “I have to admit, I didn’t get it,” said Roberts, who found the entire production “chaotic, damp, and smelly” and the designer himself deeply un-chic, “tongue-tied and chubby.” She found another young protégé, a charming, good-looking Welsh boy nimble with knits. As with Philip Treacy, she promptly brought Julien Macdonald around to McQueen and insisted he be hired. McQueen told Macdonald he had a bag of dog hair underneath his desk, and could he knit a sweater out of that? Macdonald said absolutely not, that was disgusting. He was hired. He received no salary but was paid in clothes.

He might have been young and inexperienced, but Macdonald was perceptive. Isabella, he thought, “was living her life through Philip Treacy.” She loved Lee most of all, and he often treated her like shit, “and she would take it.” Isabella got her revenge, barging backstage right before a show, demanding hair and makeup, calling McQueen’s headquarters over and over and over until they loaned her pieces that she never returned.

“We used to say that the press office at McQueen deserves a medal,” Treacy says.

To the fashion press, Issie and McQueen still presented themselves as inseparable, the muse and the mastermind. And McQueen did love her. She was his most articulate ambassador, explaining his point of view as he never could. “What attracted me to Alexander,” she said in 1996, “is the way he takes ideas from the past and sabotages them with his cut to make them thoroughly new and in the context of today. It is the complexity and severity of his approach to cut that makes him so modern. He is like a Peeping Tom in the way he slits and stabs at fabric to explore all the erogenous zones of the body.”

Lovers without the sex. “Dante,” his next show, would be dedicated to her.

After revisiting his core themes in the lackluster “Hunger” collection, McQueen needed to show true artistry. The UK press had gone from outrage to boredom. “His ideas appear too wrapped up in his angry young man pose,” said the London Times. “If McQueen could only bring himself to curb some of his more childish tantrums,” said the Guardian, “.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.