“He wasn’t afraid to explore the darker side of beauty.” – Luke Newton
BY JANET MERCEL
House of McQueen, about the fashion legend Lee Alexander McQueen, who hanged himself in 2010, just opened at The Mansion at Hudson Yards. Luke Newton plays McQueen, straight off starring in the latest season of the soapy series “Bridgerton.” With his head shaved, baggy denim and an East End slur, Newton is unrecognizable from his “Bridgerton” Regency hero with melting manners and a waistcoat. It’s uncanny, eerie and almost creepy, until Newton breaks into one of McQueen’s silly, awkward, boyish smiles to release the tension.
House of McQueen is the first-ever performance at The Mansion. I didn’t know what to expect. I only recently stopped assuming anything at Hudson Yards meant the mall. The Mansion feels like a proper Off-Broadway venue – on a nondescript side street, a steep theater with 499 seats, (albeit with 1,000 square feet of LED screens).
There are lots of lights and sounds, but it feels right in a two-hour show intent on recreating the chaos of McQueen’s own fashion spectacles (dance marathons, asylum themes, a robot spray painting Shalom Harlow) that mirrored his exhaustion, suffocation and overstimulation. The darkness that chased him all his life: childhood abuse, homophobia, classism, snobbery from those who only accepted him once he changed his teeth, his weight, his pants—is here too.
Newton fell deep down a rabbit hole of McQueen documentaries and interviews; so much of the designer’s life was captured on film that there is no shortage of material. “McQueen represents fearless creativity,” Newton says. “He wasn’t afraid to explore the darker side of beauty or to show strength through vulnerability.” Newton also turned to playwright Darrah Cloud and her exhaustive research that made her the cast’s Lee-whisperer. “It’s about carrying on a legacy while also finding space to bring in my own perspective,” Newton explains. “There’s a responsibility in representing such a strong visionary, but within this piece of theatre, I’m inspired to keep growing and to honor creativity at its boldest.”
The play took over a decade to reach the stage. The creative director is McQueen’s nephew, Gary James McQueen, who worked alongside his uncle as head of menswear textiles. As a teenager, Gary had much in common with Lee: a turbulent home life, a love of horror films and a habit of sketching to escape. Gary created the chrome skull on the cover of Savage Beauty, The McQueen hardbound book for The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition.
The show feels trustworthy, through McQueen’s complicated relationships with men and women (each of whom loved him “best”), his beloved sister’s struggle to grasp his artistic license through the viscera and violence of his collections and his codependency with his first champion, the fashion icon and editor Isabella Blow (who also took her own life in 2007). Newton shows McQueen’s crushing pain trying to explain that he doesn’t hate women at all; he’s just realistic about their existence on earth. He wants to protect them, make them warriors.
“It’s about carrying on a legacy while also finding space to bring in my own perspective. There’s a responsibility in representing such a strong visionary.” – Luke Newton
One of my favorite moments is the recreation of McQueen’s 2004 interview in The Guardian with his mother, Joyce McQueen, played by Tony-nominated actress Emily Skinner of Billy Elliot and Prince of Broadway. Originally commissioned by Sam Taylor-Wood, it’s reimagined as a television broadcast. It perfectly captures the banter between mother and son:
Joyce McQueen: Success has brought you financial security. But if you lost it all tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would do?
Alexander McQueen: Sleep. I’d be pleased.
Joyce McQueen: I said you’d go on holiday.
Alexander McQueen: What with? I’d lost it all!
One last gift to the audience: Andrew Bolton, The Met curator who famously perpetuated McQueen’s immortality with Savage Beauty. Bolton was already working on an exhibition featuring McQueen with other designers. He pivoted to a solo retrospective immediately after the designer’s death in order to save his archives from being disbanded. In that spirit, The Mansion has a show of McQueen archives, each carefully preserved in private collections throughout the years and many on display for the first time. There are over 30 pieces from McQueen’s most iconic collections ranging from 1995–2010, including Dante (FW 1996), Widows of Culloden (FW 2006), and Plato’s Atlantis (SS 2010).
