One foot on the catwalk

St James Theatre hosts a new play about Alexander McQueen (real name Lee), whose star flashed briefly across the fashion world before his suicide in 2010. It opens with a mysterious stalker, Dahlia, breaking into McQueen’s Mayfair home and demanding that he make her a dress. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shrieks but she placates him and they embark on a surreal odyssey to his childhood haunts where they meet his mentors past and present. A pretty clunky start. Who is Dahlia? A dramatic ploy, a figment of McQueen’s imagination or a real person? We don’t know so we don’t care about their relationship. Still less about her flipping dress. Every word that she prattles, and she prattles a lot of them, descends like rainfall downstream of a hydro-electric plant.

McQueen is the powerhouse here and the best details take a good while to emerge. The rag trade had caught the contagion of modern art long before McQueen broke through. Knocking up the frocks was the easy part. He also had to baptise each collection with a rhetorical motif, or ‘concept’, that would satisfy the gabblers and commentators that feed off couture. The theme needed to have a fairy-tale simplicity and grandeur but it also had to carry the clarity and potency of a world-class advertising campaign. Four times a year — spring, summer, autumn and winter — McQueen had to dream up one of these multifaceted straplines to wow the marketeers and the scribblers. It wasn’t fun. Meanwhile, he was dressing difficult stars like Bjork, who performed on stage in a frock made out of ‘2,000 microscope slides’. It tinkled. Or, as he puts it, ‘she made it an instrument’.

The silliness, isolation and opulent futility of this high-pressure life come across very forcefully.