When I woke up this morning I was shocked to see the plethora of text messages, missed calls & facebook wall posts…who died?!  Well sadly, Lee Alexander McQueen, the creator & designer of the Alexander McQueen design house committed suicide at only 40 years old.  What a tragedy in not only the fashion world but also the art world, as he was one of the most creative & innovative individuals of our time.

Lee McQueen was born & raised in London.  At the age of 16 he dropped out of school to become a tailor’s apprentice.  But his calling awaited him & he was convinced by the Head Master of Central Saint Martins Design & Art School to enroll as a fashion design student.  The rest is history…he was appointed head designer of Givenchy in 1996 after John Galliano stepped down & by 2001 he had launched his own design house, Alexander McQueen.

Known for his shockingly fabulous, costume-like collections, Lee dressed style icons such as of Lady GaGa, Rihanna, Sarah Jessica Parker and most recently Anna Paquin wore one of his metamorphic print dresses to the SAG Awards.

Here are some wonderful words spoken today by his good friends to Women’s Wear Daily:

MARC JACOBS…..“He was such a great guy and such an amazing talent that it is so devastating to know he is gone. We have a lot of mutual friends and some of them are working here, and everybody is walking around crying today.
“I will miss him, and I will certainly miss the beauty that he created, and his vision and his world. You just ask yourself ‘Why?’ and then really the answer to that question is so unnecessary in a way, since knowing ‘why’ doesn’t change anything. Death is always horrible.”

SIMON DOONAN, BARNEYS NEW YORK….“He is a uniquely British kind of phenomenon, a working class lad who bootstrapped it. He had enormous innate creative passion that ultimately gave him an incredibly broad frame of reference, from art to obscure movies to history, this spongelike passion and amazing imagination that in the end informed his design. He became within a very short period of time a very cultivated person that’s sort of a function of the English class system, which makes people so tenacious and aggressively curious.” Comparing him to John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood, Doonan characterized McQueen as “a provocateur, almost like a highwire act, an exercise in daring creativity. He raised the bar so high on what was even possible with clothing.”

Some of my favorite looks by the artistic genius, Lee Alexander McQueen:

I’m wearing my own pink & black Alexander McQueen skull scarf today in his honor…such a bad ass scarf!