Note: Please see comments by alexandra3465, a fashion journalist, in the prior post below.
This is turning out to be bigger news than I imagined — but I had not heard of Lee Alexander McQueen till yesterday. [See related article, below.] Lee killed himself just as Fashion Weeks were opening in London and New York; he will now be a growth industry. While we may not have known of Lee by name, we’ve all seen either his work or what it’s influenced. In every business there are people known mainly in that field, who are the idea generators that seem to spark off everyone else. In fashion, that was Lee. Unfortunately, most of his ideas were taken by enterprises more interested in selling than in commenting on, or responding to, our culture.
I described Lee’s chart to Dominick, my friend with the cafe, who is one of those hobby astrologers I always get the hint knows a lot more than I do. Of McQueen’s Scorpio rising, Pisces New Moon chart, lacking any significant earthy placements and dominated by water, he said that he wasn’t really ever on the Earth plane fully. Then he had three planets in Aries: Chiron, Saturn and Venus. The combination of fire and water counteracted one another; the water put out the fire and the fire evaporated the water.
“But he was probably really good in bed,” Dominick added. I would agree, but his 8th house Nessus-Vertex cautions of the kind of ‘good in bed’ that comes from a history of being abused as a kid: the real thing. He was attractive in a way that a bleeding child is attractive to sharks. And this emotional tenor came out in his work. His images of the feminine are likely to have been images of, or responses to, his own inner feminine. what else could he be commenting on?
Consider somebody with Scorpio rising and Mercury, Moon and Sun in Pisces. My own thought: Lee was held here by an umbilical cord, and when his mother died about 11 days ago, there was nothing left to ground him.