In March 2006, following months of speculation after a drug scandal the previous September, Kate Moss returned to the world stage at Lee Alexander McQueen’s ‘The Widows of Culloden’ show, emerging via hologram for its finale. Dressed in a ruffled organza gown, slowly twirling her body to John Williams’ main theme from Schindler’s List, the model’s image was met with wild applause. The hologram was similarly affecting when it appeared as a standalone art piece as part of the blockbuster retrospective ‘Savage Beauty’, which opened at The Met in May 2011, just 14 months after McQueen’s death. Watching either iteration today, via grainy YouTube footage on a 13-inch laptop screen, the spell remains intact.
‘For him to choose that piece of music to accompany the hologram for Kate, only he could have come up with that,’ says John Gosling, McQueen’s friend and long-time music director. ‘I never would have thought to do that in a million years, but it was perfect.’ Williams’ score is one of 17 pieces to feature in the repertoire of ‘Unnatural Harmony: Sounds of Lee Alexander McQueen’, a new show celebrating the music that shaped McQueen’s life and work over 20 years, created by Gosling with Robert Ames of the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO).
A hologram of Kate Moss at Alexander McQueen’s ‘The Widows of Culloden’ A/W 2006 show
The unique offering marries the many audio strands that inhabited McQueen’s orbit. Partnering the LCO with choreographer Holly Blakey, it is directed by Elayce Ismail and additionally features a new film by Douglas Hart and Eddie Whelan with work by the dancer and McQueen collaborator Michael Clark. The show is premiering as part of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival on 29 and 30 April 2026. ‘Hopefully it's a completely new thing,’ Gosling notes, ‘but the research I did for it was very nostalgic. There were so many shows I’d completely forgotten about.’
Gosling and McQueen first met in 1995, introduced by the former’s wife, Sam Gainsbury, who was already producing the designer’s elaborate presentations, having been brought on by the stylist Katy England. ‘He'd done a couple of shows by then, so people were talking about him,’ Gosling explains over the phone. ‘We were all a bit of a gang in those days, very collaborative. He was obviously a really talented visionary, and anyone who's got a really clear idea of what they want to do is interesting to work with.’
The pair’s initial collaboration was for the epic ‘Dante’ show in 1996. ‘It was exhilarating,’ recalls Gosling, who’d until then been privy to the fashion industry primarily via Gainsbury and their friends. DJing and producing, he was releasing music under the moniker Mekon, and had enjoyed an earlier stint playing with the singular performance artist Genesis P-Orridge in Psychic TV. ‘I could see that we could probably work together for a long time, which we did. We were on the same page; the nicest thing Lee ever said to me was “yeah, you get it”. We wanted to do something new, to shock people and have maximum impact within the 20-minute time frame of a fashion show.’
A film by Douglas Hart and Eddie Whelan, with work by the dancer and McQueen collaborator Michael Clark, which features as part of ‘Unnatural Harmony: Sounds of Lee Alexander McQueen’
‘With Lee, they were major theatrical events that had a lot of depth, references to all sorts. It didn't seem unusual to me, but I think it was something new for a lot of people,’ he continues. ‘Every time we did a show, it was literally on a wing and a prayer, because you only had the day of the show [to rehearse]. We didn't have much money either, so we had people for a limited time. Miraculously, it always worked, but it could have easily gone the other way. Every time we pulled something off, it was special.’
Remaining faithful to the house, Gosling would meet Ames when they collaborated on a McQueen show during Sarah Burton’s premiere. ‘We enjoyed working together, and both thought there was probably something a bit more to this than just a one-off collaboration,’ he says. ‘Unnatural Harmony’, named in part as an homage to McQueen’s S/S 2009 show, ‘Natural Dis-tinction Un-natural Selection’, is the product of much back and forth, he shares, paramount to which was coming up with an edit for the orchestra’s repertoire.
Alexander McQueen’s ‘Dante’ show, which was one of the first worked on by John Gosling
‘When we started, there were ten times the amount of tracks,’ offers Gosling. ‘Rob and I sat down and just worked out what worked next to each other. It's not chronological. It's a patchwork, that hopefully hangs together.’ Indeed, ‘Paint it Black’ by The Rolling Stones, used during Gosling’s first McQueen outing in 1996 (and for several subsequent shows) neighbours Mozart and Armand van Helden, while nestled between Björk and Philip Glass is Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’, which famously helped crash the SHOWstudio site when McQueen debuted it for the finale of ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ in 2009, in what would become the designer’s last fully realised collection.
‘I wanted to make sure that the Lee side of things came through; it wasn't just an orchestra,’ adds Gosling, speaking to his approach with the new project. ‘I got Katy England involved, to give it that authentic Lee feel. And getting to work with Michael again is lovely – I’ve known him for 30-odd years, we did a show called “Deliverance” with him [S/S 2004]; he was a good friend of Lee's. The new show’s quite a long way from where we started, a lot of things are getting thrown in. I've got absolutely no idea what it's gonna sound like – the music is just sketched out as the actual tracks [currently] – it’s really exciting.’
‘Unnatural Harmony: Sounds of Lee Alexander McQueen’ is on at the Southbank Centre, London, from 29-30 April 2026.