Report by Marion Hume
Is it appropriate to review a memorial service? To pass judgement, even if that judgement is that it was perfect?
What yesterday’s Service of Thanksgiving to celebrate the life of Lee Alexander McQueen, CBE, revealled was not just how much his closest friends miss him, but how well they knew a complex, challenging, creative soul. “It was a life lived in the public gaze, but it was as vulnerable and retiring as it was glamourous,” read the Reverend Canon Giles Fraser, “… he never forgot his East End roots and how much he owed to his loved ones.”
McQueen’s nephews, Mark McQueen and Gary Hulyer – both with ramrod-straight bearing and in immaculate tailoring – each read at the lectern, their voices true and strong. His dear friends, Shaun Leane and Annabelle Nielson, both listed in the order of service simply as “friend of Lee’s”, didn’t neglect to mention how mercurial their best mate could be - Leane recalling how he and McQueen had been described as “Bill Sykes and the Artful Dodger,” Neilson remembering how, on a bone cold Christmas Day at the cottage by the sea near Hastings, McQueen had lost the house keys on a chilly beach walk and how they only found them again, among the pebbles, once the turkey had burnt to a cinder.
The fashion world had a somewhat different relationship with the man known on that wider stage not as Lee but as Alexander McQueen. But Anna Wintour, who gave an address resplendent in a fitted black coat emblazoned with gold, spoke not so much as the mighty editor-in-chief of American Vogue, certainly not at all as the caricature she is sometimes painted as, but as a woman who loves to nurture amazing talent, who was utterly exasperated, in the early days, by McQueen’s inability to take graciously the help that was being offered. Then she spoke of her growing recognition that his East End childhood meant he came from a different world. She told of the first photo session he was supposed to participate in for US Vogue, how he failed to show up and how, when Vogue’s Hamish Bowles called to find where he’d got to, he was subjected to a hail of colourful London expletives. Only years later did Wintour and Bowles discover that back then, McQueen was on the dole and he’d been terrified some fashion-obsessed DSS officer would see him in the magazine and cancel his welfare cheques.
Suzy Menkes ended her address with a quote from John Keats’ Endymion, her voice quivering with emotion as she said, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” The doyenne of The International Herald Tribune saw every single McQueen show. It was left to her to say out loud, what we were all thinking; that the Alexander McQueen who had dragged us to a crumbling Hitchcockian film studio and the unnerving and deconsecrated Hawksmoor church in Spitalfields would have thought St. Paul’s, with its glorious gilded mosaics, its marble momento mori, its dome rising 365 feet over the City of London, the ultimate venue.
While McQueen reveled in a Scottish heritage, he was quintessentially a Londoner; with his Savile Row training and the speed with which he raced home when he was working for Givenchy in Paris. That St. Paul’s is London’s ultimate iconic building, the symbol still of the strength of a city that will not be cowed, made this venue yet more appropriate.
Michael Nyman played “The Heart asks for pleasure first”, better known as the soaring theme music he wrote for Jane Campion’s movie, “The Piano” . Bjork, dressed as a winged celestial sprite, appeared from near the entrance to the crypt in her extraordinary outfit and sang “Gloomy Sunday” based on the version sung by Billie Holiday, in her extraordinary voice. The hymns were rousing; “I vow to thee, my country” and of course “Jerusalem” with its bow of burning gold, its arrows of desire. Philip Treacy, who met McQueen through their late muse, Isabella Blow, read a prayer.
We wondered, us fashion people, what the the dean, the pastor, the chaplain of Sir Christopher Wren’s mighty cathedral, built up on the ashes of the 1666 Great Fire of London, would be thinking of us in the fashion finery of towering high heels and exotic hats and, in some cases, perilously short skirts. Lucrezia Walker, who sat centre stage with the reverends throughout, who was wearing a crimson robe of which Lee Alexander McQueen would surely have approved, is the cathedral’s Lay Canon. She commented after the service how impressive those who (odd though it seems to us) do this for a living, for St. Paul’s is their workplace, had found the service. “He must have been an extraordinary man,” she said, surveying those leaving by the worn stone steps.
Indeed.
