Backstage at an early Alexander McQueen show, 1993. Photograph by Michael Roberts. Isabella Blow was the first one to tell me about this ‘amazing new talent’ Alexander McQueen. “You absolutely have to do a huge story on him,” she said out of the blue one day, wagging a finger in my face. “He is the only hope of British fashion.” After working for me in the 80s, Blow had gone on to become the grande dame of English fashion, and in her role as fashion director of The Sunday Times she frequently rang to inform me about some mad new creative discovery who needed money. Or a job. Or both. Whenever I failed to come up with the cash, which was often, I always felt she thought I wasn’t doing my job. So when she called me in Paris in the early 90s to say that the next time I came to London if I only saw one fashion show it had to be McQueen’s, I was exceedingly reluctant to go. The venue, a seedy basement club in Piccadilly was filled with the most unlikely models, street people of mixed race, size, and indeterminable gender, one model even heavily pregnant. The stage was ramshackle, and the hairdresser, another find of Isabella’s, was a dazed-looking punk. The whole affair was chaotic, damp, and smelly, but there in the middle was Isabella about to do a spot of modeling with the word “McQueen” stenciled onto her hair in silver spray. Without hesitation she took me through rails of clothes that were as different, new, and difficult to understand as those shown by the Japanese designers when they first took Paris by storm. McQueen came to say hello. He was tongue-tied and chubby with an open, childlike face that should have been advertising baby food. He let Isabella speak for him and then he ran away.

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