Tree people: A woodland theme for fall 2008.
“I don’t know, it was time to come out of the darkness and into the light,” McQueen says. “It was kind of my life.”
Witches had proved the most shocking, yet not the sole, expression of the bleakness of that period, bracketed as it was by spring 2007’s lyrically beautiful Sarabande, about “wilting decay,” and spring 2008’s ode to Isabella Blow, in which one could find ample pathos in the notice-me clash of madcap hats and aggressive tailoring that the fashion editor was known for.
“I learned a lot from her death,” McQueen says. “I learned a lot about myself. [I learned] that life is worth living. Because I’m just fighting against it, fighting against the establishment. She loved fashion, and I love fashion, and I was just in denial.”
The night before this interview—and before his birthday—McQueen had a dream about Blow. She had come back from the dead to get free clothes from a tailor. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She was like, ‘I’m getting some free clothes and then [having] them altered.’ She’s getting more free clothes!” he says with a laugh.
“The thing about Isabella is, money was like water for her,” he explains ruefully. It’s a theme that would surface even after her death, and not only in a dream. The two met when, after McQueen’s spectacular student show at St. Martins in 1994, Blow wanted badly to meet him, even tracking down his mother and calling her relentlessly to arrange an introduction to her gifted son (she would later buy the entire collection). “Who was this loony lady calling?” he recalls. “She met my mother before she met me. They loved each other.” So much so that, shortly before she died, Blow went to see McQueen’s mother in Essex, leaving her with many mementos. It’s a visit McQueen now realizes was a deliberate goodbye.
Shortly before, Blow, who was long known to have suffered bouts of depression and who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, had arranged a private meeting with him as well at her house in the Cotswolds. “We were at peace with each other,” McQueen says. “She had called me up. Two weeks before she did it, she made a point to get me there. And I thought she was fine. We sat down and talked for about three hours, we talked about things we had been through and…. God, I’m hoping things are all right. I said, ‘You look so good,’ and I said, ‘You’re not talking about death—no, are you?’ And she said, ‘No, no.’ She really f---ing shamboozled me, didn’t she? She knew what she was doing. I was just—she had convinced me that she was fine, that she had come through the worst of it.”
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