Alexander McQueen’s last interview

You won’t even have to leave the office! We’ll send it over to you. By satellite. Toa glass pyramid that will hover on your desk. You’ll see the catwalk happening right there in pyramid. All the girls will be walking around in the pyramid if they were actually there in front of you! Actually in the room!’ Lee McQueen is frantically dragging on a fag as he describes how he thinks fashion shows are going to evolve ‘within the next ten years’. He is deadly serious.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. His idea may sound a bit far-fetched, but then so did its scaled up version, where a holographic Kate Moss appeared in a giant pyramid on the catwalk for his Widows of Culloden collection 2006, and he did that. In fact, even though fashion designers like Dolce&Gabbana had streamed live shows before, just last season it sounded a little bit far-fetched than McQueen could beam his show (which took the form of a huge scale recreation of Atlantis, holograms, sea aliens, robot cameras and all) out all over internet live as it happened, but just two weeks before we meet he did that too.

Kind of. Due to some confusion involving Lady Gaga, Twitter and technological things too dull to mention, millions more visitors than expected flooded the site and send the whole thing a bit tits up. The idea was there though. ‘Bloody Twitter!’ McQueen laughs of the incident, failing to mask a real sense of disappointment. ‘That whole event was huge though. People have streamed shows before but no one has done anything like this; I treat it like theatre. The show level. really, is where you can’t compete with McQueen. We did a bloody hologram and two robots! Burberry’s never going to do that!’

Since his first show in 1994, McQueen has wheeled out everything from mirrored cubes containing mad fat women and moth to models miming electrocution in his shows. In the last few season though, as technology has caught up and allowed him to truly indulge his vision, it has become clear that beyond creating a bit of a spectacle, the way he handles his shows in fact nothing short of a call for a complete overhaul of the way we display and consume clothes.

‘It all comes down to the fact that I don’t advertise, so shows are really self-promotion,’ he explains. ‘Not everyone in the world reads Vogue, but a lot more have the internet; even if I advertised in American Vogue, or W, it wouldn’t reach as big an audience. So I have put all of that budget into shows. And they can start paying for themselves now, thanks to the streaming; they can actually start directly getting people shopping, even if it’s just to buy McQ. It means I’m giving everyone a front row at home. Getting rid of the elitism of Paris and that old system’

The subject of ‘that old system’ is one of that garners McQueen’s unbridled contempt. ‘People always ask if I think about a concept of the show or the front row or whatever first.’ he blurts. ‘No! Fuck off! The client comes first! The collection is driven by what clients want in different parts of the world, so I want them to be able to see it straight away and judge it for themselves.’ So does he envision the future without the middlemen of the press altogether? ‘Well I just think that which celebrities are wearing it, what reviews say – none of it matters if it’s all there for people to make their own minds up. I’m 40 now, but I want this to be a company that lives way beyond me, and I believe that customers are more important to making that happen than press. When I’m dead, hopefully this house will still be going. On a spaceship. Hopping up and down above earth.’ Once again, he’s deadly serious.