Before the museums
In conversation with Mira Chai-Hyde
Long before Alexander McQueen became the subject of museum retrospectives, Mira Chai-Hyde knew him simply as Lee. Her archive preserves the garments, photographs and traces of a life lived close to the making of the work.
Proximity
Before the archive became history
Mira Chai-Hyde knew Alexander McQueen as Lee. Friendship, work and daily life brought his clothes into her rooms.
A jacket given after a show, a skirt made for her, an invitation kept: the archive grew through those exchanges. Garments stayed with photographs and working papers, preserving the years around their making.
Hoxton
Life above the studio
Their story began in Hoxton, in London’s fashion and music circles of the 1990s. Mira had come to study at Vidal Sassoon and would live in the city for 18 years. Hair became her way of shaping character and presence; work brought her into the creative world around McQueen’s studio.
Lee was working below, testing the possibilities of clothing through cut, performance and unexpected references.
Their friendship grew in the daily rhythm of the building. Conversations between floors and work on the shows became part of a life shared across the same rooms.
For nearly two years, Lee lived in Mira’s Hoxton Square loft. Home and studio overlapped; she knew the work as it was taking shape, before its appearance on the runway.
The archive keeps that daily closeness in view.
A lived archive
What remained
She cut Lee’s hair. She worked on his menswear shows. She contributed to campaigns and helped shape the hair and grooming that formed part of his visual language. Through Mira, Lee encountered the cult film The Hunger, which became an important reference for his Spring–Summer 1996 collection.
Isabella Blow, Sarah Burton, Shaun Leane and Katy England were among the people around them, each contributing to the collections as McQueen’s studio took shape.
Over time, garments entered Mira’s life. Some were gifts. Some were exchanged for work. Some were made specifically for her. Others were given informally, in the way objects pass between people who are not thinking of history at the moment of exchange.
Mira kept them.
The pieces now form a connected archive, with their personal histories held alongside collection names, materials and dates.
The clothes remained because they belonged to Mira’s life.
The archive spans Highland Rape, The Hunger, Dante, Bellmer La Poupée, It’s a Jungle Out There, No. 13, VOSS, Irere, Plato’s Atlantis and McQueen’s work at Givenchy. The public collections remain connected to the rooms, friendships and working days in which they began.
Garments
Objects carried through friendship
Four memories
The life held inside the clothes
A hunter green military-style jacket from Highland Rape, Autumn/Winter 1995, is among the archive’s earliest runway pieces. Wool, gold braid, a mandarin collar and a peplum weighted with pennies give it a precise, commanding form. In Mira’s collection, its history is also one of friendship and creative exchange.
The low-rise bumster trousers from the same collection changed the proportions of the body, exposing the base of the spine and extending the torso. Mira wore the silhouette herself. Her experience keeps its physical effect close to the object: a shift in posture and a newly exposed part of the body.
A burgundy organza coat from The Hunger, Spring/Summer 1996, introduces a different register of memory. Semi-transparent and finished with a feathered design and sharply peaked lapel, it combines delicacy with the more predatory elegance that ran through the collection. Mira remembers receiving it during an evening in the Hoxton loft with Lee and Isabella Blow. They were sitting together, talking and laughing, when Lee went downstairs to the studio and returned with gifts: one for Isabella, and this coat for Mira. The gesture was informal, but its informality is precisely what gives it weight. It records a moment of friendship rather than ceremony.
A dark green, low-waisted skirt was made to order for Mira around 1995 under McQueen’s direction. Lee chose the fabric himself. Raw hems and a yoked back carry his exploration of the dropped waist into a piece made for someone he knew.
A separate nude silk illusion gown from The Hunger holds one of McQueen’s early hair labels: a transparent pouch containing human hair, stitched beneath his name. For Mira, whose work centred on hair and grooming, the material carries a particular resonance.
Other objects in the archive record the working life around the garments. A black silk satin dress, handed to Mira late in the studio after the sewing machines had fallen silent. A glass jar holding fuchsia glitter and fabric remnants. Original sketches. Show materials. Invitations. Passes. Hangers and garment racks from the Hoxton Square studio. These pieces may appear quieter than the runway garments, but they are essential to the archive’s meaning. They preserve the daily conditions of fashion: fittings, edits, materials, gestures, favours, labour and trust.
The garments and these smaller objects remain together. Their personal histories give the runway collections a setting in daily life.
Behind the runway
Backstage at Irere
The photographs in Mira’s archive extend that sense of proximity. Polaroids, personal snapshots and behind-the-scenes images from collections including The Hunger, Dante and Irere return McQueen’s world to a human scale. They show the atmosphere around the clothes: the faces, bodies, gestures and friendships that surrounded their making.
The backstage photographs from Irere, Spring/Summer 2003, are especially revealing. Taken by Mira, they do not present the collection from the distance of the runway, but from the charged space before the reveal. Models appear in close view, their faces painted, hair sculpted, bodies still, alert and waiting. Shaun Leane’s feather and porcupine-quill jewellery appears not as a finished image on the runway, but as part of a living backstage environment: being worn, adjusted, inhabited and transformed.
The images catch the concentration before a show: people waiting, hands adjusting, a look still being completed. Through Mira’s lens, preparation becomes part of the collection’s history.
Works on paper
Ideas before they became objects
Invitations addressed to Mira, credits bearing her name, post-show drinks cards and lookbooks keep another register of the work. An invitation names its intended guest; a production credit records a contribution. Beside photographs and recollections, these small papers recover the relationships around a collection.
Evidence of presence
The private life around the work
A hand-typed production-credits card for Dante, Autumn/Winter 1996–97, names Mira for men’s hair and grooming. On its reverse is a black-and-white photograph of Lee reclining on a sofa with Minter, the dog he adopted with Mira, inside the Hoxton Square apartment where private life and creative life overlapped.
A formal credit gives way to a picture from home. The two sides keep the show and its surrounding life within the same small object.
That closeness runs through the papers as much as the clothes.
Mira Chai-Hyde
A language shaped through hair
Mira’s own story is inseparable from that atmosphere. Born in Manila and later raised in California, she came to hair through instinct as much as discipline. She moved to London to study at Vidal Sassoon, where she was named “Best Barber” in 1989. London became her home for 18 years: the city where she developed an approach to hair that was sharp, intuitive and emotionally intelligent, and where she found herself among the designers, musicians, photographers and stylists reshaping fashion’s visual language.
Mira understood how hair could change the way a person carried themselves. That attention to character would travel with her through fashion, music and film.
Her later career included work with David Bowie, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Pedro Pascal and U2. The McQueen years hold a particular place within that history, through a friendship that extended beyond the studio.
She knew Lee before the mythology hardened.
Legacy
A record of relationship
Mira’s memories return to Lee as a friend and collaborator, within the rooms where the collections began.
A jacket keeps the memory of an exchange; a made-to-order skirt recalls the fabric Lee chose for her. The production card holds a name on one side and a scene from home on the other. Their histories meet through the person who kept them.
Together, the objects give the public collections a private setting.
The archive is available for private acquisition through Three Over Six. Detailed records allow its connected history to move with the objects, into future study, exhibitions and collections.
The garments retain the force of McQueen’s imagination. The papers and photographs bring the people around that work closer.
Mira’s account gives those objects their human setting: where they were made, how they arrived and why they stayed.
Their next chapter begins with that history intact.
What remains
A record of presence
“Mira kept those traces.”
A garment, a photograph, a small card from a show. Kept together, they bring the life around the work into view.
Mira kept them. Their stories remain close.