Flamboyant British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found dead at his London home after apparently committing suicide barely a week after his mother died, police and reports said.
Emergency services were called to the 40-year-old’s home in central London on Thursday and he was pronounced dead at the scene, while Scotland Yard said the death was not being treated as suspicious. Reports said he hanged himself.
A spokeswoman for the bad boy of British fashion, who rapidly built an international reputation for his outrageous creations, said: “Mr McQueen was found dead this morning at his home.”
PHOTO: AFP
“At this stage it is inappropriate to comment on this tragic news beyond saying that we are devastated and are sharing a sense of shock and grief,” a statement on his label’s Web site said.
McQueen, a four-time winner of the British designer of the year award, was creative director of his own label, which was bought out by Gucci and was one of Britain’s most lauded fashion designers.
His death came days before London fashion week and ahead of Paris fashion week next month.
Media reports said his mother Joyce died last week, and in a comment on McQueen’s Twitter page last Sunday he wrote that he had had an “awful week, but my friends have been great, but now I have to somehow pull myself together.”
The Times newspaper reported that his mother was to be buried yesterday.
McQueen’s close friend and fashion icon Isabella Blow killed herself three years ago at the age of 48. Suffering from cancer and depression, she died of a drug overdose after telling friends she was going out shopping.
Tributes poured in after Thursday’s death was announced.
German couture legend Karl Lagerfeld told reporters: “I knew him very little but knew his work, which brought him a lot of success. I found his work very interesting and never banal.”
“There was always some attraction to death, his designs were sometimes dehumanized,” Lagerfeld said. “Who knows, perhaps after flirting with death too often, death attracts you.”
The death was reported shortly after 10am. Seven hours later, the body was brought out of his home on a stretcher and loaded into a private ambulance.
Born in London’s East End into a working-class family — his father was a taxi driver — McQueen rose to fame after graduating from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, a hotbed of British fashion, in 1991. McQueen cut his teeth as a tailor in Savile Row, where legend has it that he left his distinctive mark — in the form of hand-written obscenities -- in the lining of a jacket for Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.
After spells with designers Romeo Gigli and Koji Tatsuno, he started his own label and quickly became a controversial figure.
He designed the famous “bumster” trousers, which displayed the cleavage between model’s buttocks in a parody of the low-slung trousers worn by workers on London building sites.
After earning the title of best British designer of the Year in 1996, he moved to France as chief designer at Givenchy, where he continued to shock.
McQueen’s position in the mainstream was assured in 2000, however, when the Gucci Group bought out 51 percent of his label, and the past decade has seen him launch flagship stores in New York, London and Milan.
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