News of a Movie About Alexander McQueen Has Us Thinking of His Leading Ladies Inline
Photo: Dave Benett / Getty Images1/8Isabella Blow
On paper, the upper-class fashion editor Isabella Blow had little in common with the working-class designer Alexander McQueen, but over the course of many years they developed a symbiotic relationship. It all began when Blow saw the designer’s Saint Martins graduate show. “I couldn’t get a seat, so I sat on the stairs and I was just watching, when I suddenly thought: I really like those clothes, they are amazing,” she recalled in a 2005 interview. “I tried to get hold of him and I kept calling his mother, but he was on holiday. . . . I eventually got to meet him and I decided to buy the collectsion: I bought one thing a month and paid him £100 a week.”
Photo: Dave Benett / Getty Images2/8Annabelle Neilson
Lee called her “my girl Annie Tinkerbell”; others says Annabelle Neilson referred to herself as “Mrs. McQueen,” so close were the unlikely pair. They met through Blow in the early ’90s, who thought that Neilson could model for the designer, which she did. Unafraid to wear his most demanding and exhibitionist creations, Neilson became, in a manner of speaking, his partner in crime.
Photo: Mark Campbell / REX Shutterstock3/8Katy England
When the British stylist, who worked side by side with McQueen for 13 years, married Bobby Gillespie in 2006, she wore—what else—a McQueen dress. “We were so ballsy,” she says of their early days together, “very higgely-piggely.”
Photo: Michel Dufour / WireImage4/8Kate Moss
Often gruff, Alexander McQueen showed his own brand of chivalry when, at the close of his Spring 2006 show, he demonstrated his support for bestie Kate Moss, then embroiled in a tabloid scandal, by taking his bow in a T-shirt printed with “We love you Kate.” Just a season after that, he closed his collectsion with an ethereal hologram of the model and, evidently, his dream girl.
Photo: Mike Marsland / WireImage5/8Naomi Campbell
“I’ve never met anyone like Alexander McQueen,” said Naomi Campbell at the London opening of “Savage Beauty.” “He was a genius, he was innovative, he was a caring friend.”
Photo: Mike Marsland / WireImage6/8Björk
In 1997 the otherworldly Icelandic singer was introduced to McQueen by Blow, and worked with him on the now-iconic visuals for Homogenic. She has described their ongoing collaborations as “a real mash-up of fertile minds . . . [that] was vital to my development.”
Photo: Dave Benett / Getty Images7/8Daphne Guinness
Isabella Blow long wanted Daphne Guinness and McQueen, two of her favorite people, to meet, but the fated event happened by accident, on the street. A fast friendship was born between McQueen and Guinness, who wears archival pieces by the designer in the video for her single, “Evening in Space.”
Photo: Stephen Lovekin / FilmMagic8/8Sarah Burton
Having worked quietly by McQueen’s side for more than a decade, Sarah Burton (seen here at the Met Ball with Florence Welch and Cate Blanchett) stepped into the late designer’s shoes in 2010. “The substance of Burton’s style as an It girl,” wrote Sarah Mower in Vogue, “is what she stands for: discretion, loyalty, hard work, and niceness.”
