Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin

By: Andrew Wilson

Narrated by: Piers Hampton

When Alexander McQueen committed suicide in February 2010, aged just 40, a shocked world mourned the loss of its most visionary fashion designer.

McQueen had risen from humble beginnings as the youngest child of an East London taxi driver to scale the heights of fame, fortune and glamour. He designed clothes for the world's most beautiful women, including Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. In business he created a multimillion-pound luxury brand that became a favourite with both celebrities and royalty, most famously the Duchess of Cambridge, who wore a McQueen dress on her wedding day. But behind the confident facade and bad-boy image lay a sensitive soul who struggled to survive in the ruthless world of fashion.

As the pressures of work intensified, so McQueen became increasingly dependent on the drugs that contributed to his tragic end. Meanwhile, in his private life, his failure to find lasting love with a string of boyfriends only added to his despair. And then there were the dark secrets that haunted his sleep....

A modern-day fairy tale infused with the darkness of a Greek tragedy, Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin is soon to be adapted for film, directed by Andrew Haigh (45 Years). This book tells the sensational story of McQueen's rise from his hard East London upbringing to the hedonistic world of fashion. Those closest to the designer - his family, friends and lovers - have spoken for the first time about the man they knew, a fragmented and insecure individual, a lost boy who battled to gain entry into a world that ultimately destroyed him.

©2016 Andrew Wilson (P)2018 Audible, Ltd

Earnest and Voyeuristic

The author makes no apologies for Lee. The entire thing feels like a juicy second hand secret.

Great! Interesting and well researched

The book is fantastic. Great insight into McQueen’s life, and the best biography to date. Save for a couple of examples where the narrator mispronounces a few words, it is very enjoyable.

McQueen is made tangible in Wilson's masterpiece

Page by page Wilson draws you into the realms of tortured genius and creative passion!

Rags to Riches

I feel very bad for this tortured soul … he was definitely traumatized by sexual predators at a young age… his head was really messed with . I wish they could have explained more in depth exactly how his gifts came to light . There was a lot about his terrible personality quirks and very bad habits … abusing drugs and alcohol…, very very promiscuous sexually even with his HIV diagnosis he still delved deep into drugs and unprotected sex …. He was a very sad, aggressive, kind of mean person and a kind of gross person too ….. He was surrounded by fashion vampires of coarse so there’s lots of info on those freaks but we never really find out the extent of this guys gifts and genius the real origin’s . Very tawdry information here not a lot of deep material on his talent and it’s origins. I definitely have less of an opinion on him now because of this book .

Lost in Translation?

Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin is a very ambitious book. Author Andrew Wilson does a great job of detailing the reasons for the designer's untimely demise, which is what I think he set out to accomplish. My issue is with the focus of the book. I was hoping to gain more insight about the development and blossoming of McQueen’s creative genius. Many great artists and brilliant people of all kinds are difficult and develop mental health and addiction issues. I am less interested in the ways that McQueen acted out and more fascinated by the humor that all of his friends said he had and of course his artistic genius. I did learn a lot about the collections and I loved those passages of this book the most. Andrew Wilson describes the fashion shows and the events surrounding them in great vivid detail. The narration performance by Piers Hampton contributes strongly to this work.

I would recommend this book to a specific subset of Alexander McQueen fans. I would recommend this only to those fans who are not disturbed by graphic descriptions of sex and drug use. They say it is best not to meet one’s heroes. My admiration of the fashions remain after reading this, but it was hard to maintain my admiration of the designer himself. I hope that someone who was close to him will come forward and write about the other aspects of his life that were missed here.