The East End Boy

February 11, 2010, the McQueen Mayfair flat above the Costa coffee shop on Green Street. Lee Alexander McQueen, forty, the East End tailor's son who had reached the front rank of European fashion in fifteen years, hangs himself in his closet. His mother Joyce has died of cancer nine days earlier. His autumn-winter ready-to-wear show is scheduled for the following week. He has been on antidepressants and cocaine and ketamine for the better part of a decade. He is forty-five days short of his forty-first birthday.

Vivien Beauchamp's biography opens earlier — in Stratford, East London, where Lee Alexander was born in 1969, the youngest of six children of a London taxi driver — and follows the arc through the Rokeby Comprehensive School and the sixteen-year-old apprenticeship at the Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard, the Central Saint Martins MA Fashion class of 1992 and the Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims graduation collection that Isabella Blow bought entire, the long collaboration with Blow and the 1996 appointment as head designer at Givenchy, the Spring 1995 highland-rape collection and the 1999 No. 13 show with the Shalom Harlow paint-spraying robots, the 2007 Blow suicide that the book treats as the wound under everything, the 2010 Mayfair closet, and the long Sarah Burton-led posthumous house that has continued the work in his name.

What emerges is a portrait of the East End tailor's son whose fifteen-year ascent through European fashion remade what a runway could look like, and whose body the work — and the death of the two women who had loved him most — finally took.