IT IS MIDDAY AND THE SUN IS struggling to appear from behind the clouds, yet the Venetian blinds of Alexander McQueen's office are drawn and a black candle burns on his desk. Somehow, this shadowy world seems appropriate for a designer who has become known for his darkly disturbing and poignantly romantic fashion shows.
Sitting in his big black chair, McQueen - Lee to his friends - is reaching for another tissue. Hayfever? Or a cold? 'No, just run down,' he says. It's a couple of weeks since his spring/summer 2008 menswear show in Milan and the designer has a reputation for committing body and soul to getting everything just right. You sense the pressure hangs heavy on his shoulders, but his commitment to his creativity is paramount and that period during the build-up is intense and all consuming for him and those around him. As Sam Gainsbury, the show's producer, says: 'Lee gets what Lee wants.'
'If you don't advertise, then you have to create a different impact,' is McQueen's reasoning for the rock concert allure of his shows. 'If you have half an hour of someone's attention, then you have got to make it half an hour that they remember for the rest of their lives,' he says.
McQueen's shows are the highlight of the Paris collections. They are compelling, each wildly imaginative extravaganza instilling a lasting emotional memory in the audience. There is always a narrative theme, which is what makes them such powerful theatre. There have been mesmerising visions such as models skating on an ice stage in a blizzard, or the floating hologram of Kate Moss in a billowing white dress from the 'Widows of Culloden' collection. Other memorable shows have included sinister finales such as the one that featured a model as Joan of Arc, clad in red sequins and encircled by a ring of fire, or - McQueen's favourite moment - model Shalom Harlow being spray-painted by robotic paint machines in his spring/summer 1999 show, 'Robots'.
'That was really powerful because it was about man and machine,' he says. The concept, he continues, was inspired by an installation by artist Rebecca Horn of two shotguns firing blood-red paint at each other. Another show that stood out for McQueen was spring/summer 2004, which included a dance performance choreographed by Michael Clark and inspired by the 24-hour dance marathon in Sydney Pollack's 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.
McQueen's collections begin with a concept that dictates the design of the clothes. Sometimes the subjects are dark and provocative; sometimes they are light and romantic. 'The work is autobiographical, they depict the mood of the times and the mood I am in at that moment,' McQueen says. For instance, last summer's collection (2007) was inspired by Handel's haunting Sarabande in Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon (1975). '[The show] was about the degradation of war and all the crap we were going through about Iraq,' McQueen says. 'The romance in the music fuelled the romance in the clothes, the decay of the flowers falling off the dress, it was about poetry in motion.'
McQueen says his shows are always exorcising his ghosts. 'Doing that is just something that is part of me,' he explains. His difficult upbringing in London's East End is well charted, but the collections are also about coming to terms with who he is and the way he thinks about life.