To that end, McQueen says he knows “we’re all looking up to Daddy,” and thus he feels a healthy dose of faux-filial, intragroup competition, particularly with Balenciaga’s Nicolas Ghesquière, whom he met once and found to be a “nice, nice guy.” He notes the diversity of Gucci Group’s smaller houses, and the distinctive voices that he, Ghesquière and Stella McCartney bring to the party.
And what of the remarkable behemoth that is Frida Giannini’s Gucci? By comparison, McQueen considers his business, as well as McCartney’s and Ghesquière’s Balenciaga, to be upstarts—mere “adolescents” at the big people’s table.
“I’m talking about building a luxury brand from scratch, and there wasn’t any [precedent]—maybe Marc [Jacobs], but he’s a bit older than us. These new designers, the new generation of luxury brands [could become] like the new Chanel and the new Balenciaga and the new Dior. I see it like that, and now I can see there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
And along the way, a few lovely perks—some with the lure of bourgeois comforts he finally seems content to embrace as he approaches 40. McQueen recently purchased a grand apartment with a provenance—Oscar Wilde lived there—close to the theaters and classical concert halls he expects to frequent. Quite a step up for someone with his rough-and-tumble past.
“It’s a new lease on life,” he says. “What I was worried about when I first started in fashion was not being homeless, and now we’re talking about a world den, you know what I mean? It’s a bit of a contradictory turn.”
The apartment overlooks the river and is close to St. James Park, perfect for his beloved trio of dogs—an English bulldog, a Rhodesian ridgeback and a Mongol—and not far from Buckingham Palace, which he visited several years ago when he received a CBE from the Queen. He went to accept it, he claims, only because his mother wanted to see the palace; he was fiercely antiroyalist at the time. But the Queen won him over “because she was so sweet. She smiled and her eyes were so blue, and I just smiled back and I felt like a duckling.” Now, he jokes (or does he?) that he wouldn’t mind an upgrade and suggests that his fall show was part of a campaign to woo Her Majesty in that direction: “I thought, I’ll do this thing on the Queen, and I’ll get the knighthood. I’ll become Sir Alexander McQueen.”
If such a plan seems a bit establishment for a bloke who rose to fame on the strength of a now infamous collection called The Highland Rape, life has changed for McQueen in other respects, as well, including the way he socializes with his once hard-partying inner circle: fewer nights out, quiet dinners replacing more raucous activity. But the friendships remain intact, another blessing that has allowed McQueen, despite his naturally wary nature, to seek the light. “My relationships with producers or photographers—these are relationships that took years,” he says. “I’ve had good times; I’ve had bad times. If I do a bad show, they’re still there. And that’s what to me friendship is about. I love what it’s about.”
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