by CATHY HORYN
Published: September 20, 2010
LONDON — About 1,000 people, some in homage plumes, nearly all in raven black, gathered here on Monday under the soaring dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral to celebrate the life of the renegade designerAlexander McQueen, whose genius remained resiliently set against the minor and the conventional.
Alluding to the joy he found in creating beautiful clothes and presenting them in extraordinary settings, Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor of The International Herald Tribune, one of four speakers, said of St. Paul’s: “It would have been his ultimate venue.”
Mr. McQueen was found dead at the age of 40 on Feb. 11 in his home in London, his death ruled a suicide.
The memorial service started promptly at 11 a.m. after a crowd of onlookers had gathered outside behind police barricades to watch the parade of arriving celebrities and fashion-world figures, many of them in town for LondonFashion Week.
Inside the cathedral, two choirs led a clerical procession past Mr. McQueen’s family members on one side and his friends and colleagues on the other, seated in a facing semicircle. They included the designers Stella McCartneyand Hussein Chalayan; the actress Sarah Jessica Parker; the models Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss; and the heiress and couture collector Daphne Guinness, who was somberly outfitted in McQueen tailoring with a black feather-shaped hat.
In his opening address, the Rev. Canon Giles Fraser acknowledged the two distinct spheres of influence on the designer.
“When he needed support and solace, he found it in his family,” Mr. Fraser said. “Which is why, despite the dazzle of his world, he never forgot his East End roots.”
Mr. McQueen’s father, Ron, who attended the service, was a taxi driver; his mother, Joyce, a social science teacher, died Feb. 2 after a long illness, a loss that was said to have left Mr. McQueen devastated. The service was full of the English pomp and circumstance to which Mr. McQueen was not immune. The London Community Gospel Choir performed “Amazing Grace” as a collection was taken to benefit, among other charities favored by Mr. McQueen, the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
The singer Bjork, dressed in a feathery gray and brown skirt and a parchment set of wings that framed her small, gold-capped head — presumably an allusion to the designer’s love of birds and falconry — movingly sang “Gloomy Sunday,” based on the Billie Holiday version.
Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, observed in her address that Mr. McQueen was a man of profound contradictions. “There was no comfort zone with Alexander McQueen,” Ms. Wintour said, noting that people could be delighted, repulsed and amazed by his fashion.
Mr. McQueen altered the shape of the body using, for example, corsetry and anatomically correct breast plates as a recurring motif. He drew on Orientalism, classicism, English eccentrics and his ideas about the future, combining them in complex and often perplexing ways. At his last show, in October 2009, the models wore platform shoes that looked like the hulls of ships.
He was equally capable of belligerent and impulsive behavior; he was famous for not showing up for appointments and grand events alike.
Ms. Wintour recalled that when he was a rising star in the early 1990s, he failed to appear for his first photo shoot for American Vogue; she learned later, she said, that he did not want the British welfare authorities to see him pictured in a fashion magazine, as he was then living “on the dole.”
There were to be other vanishing acts in Mr. McQueen’s career. Yet when he came bounding into the Costume Institute gala a few years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, turned out in tartan and escorting Ms. Parker, all was forgiven, said Ms. Wintour, who wore an embroidered McQueen coat over a bronze metallic dress.
“We always forgave Alexander,” she said.
There were only indirect references to Mr. McQueen’s private troubles — he had an acknowledged history of drug abuse and wild behavior — though the speakers noted that creativity was his main emotional outlet. And there was surprisingly little mention of his great muse, Isabella Blow,who died in 2007. Still, as guests entered the cathedral, among them the writer Plum Sykes in a McQueen black dress and peaked hat, a British editor murmured out loud, “I wish Izzy could have been here.”
As the service ended around noon, rays of sunshine broke through onto the checkered stone floor and a lone bagpiper walked slowly down the center aisle, past the congregation, toward the entrance to St. Paul’s, playing music from the film “Braveheart.” He was followed by the choirs and the members of the clergy, and was joined on the front steps by 20 pipers. As the guests filed out, many paused and listened, as did the crowd in the street below.
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