The most celebrated collaboration in haute couture began with the eight-word dialogue:

“So, you’re a jeweller?”

“Yeah, I make jewellery.”

Jeweller Shaun Leane crossed paths with designer Lee Alexander McQueen by chance in 1992. The two were introduced by a mutual friend from Central Saint Martins at a pub on Charing Cross Road, mere weeks before McQueen would showcase his lauded graduate collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.

Leane began his practice with an aversion to academia. A year after dropping out of school at the age of14, he enrolled in a jewellery design course at the Westminster Kingsway College. His talent was quickly recognised by an instructor, who recommended he apply for an apprenticeship scholarship in Hatton Garden, London's historic jewellery quarter. After succeeding, he immersed himself in goldsmithing.

Leane’s affinity for metal work culminated in 1993, when McQueen visited his workspace for the first time, a year after the two met. Though Leane has recounted (and naturally altered) the story several times, two things remain consistent. One, that McQueen expressed pure wonder at Leane's craftsmanship, and two, that he recognised an electric potential in him.

Most familiar with both designers would have seen the fruits of their combined labour by now. Images of sinewy metallic branches, glistening with pearl clusters and draped over the shoulders; sculptural corsets blooming with silver roses; interlocking aluminium tiles resembling ancient armour, also embellished with crimson crystals.

Since Leane’s retirement in October 2024 and the recent news of McQueen’s sketches sold at a Kerry Taylor auction on December 10th, these works have resurfaced alongside a renewed interest in the pair. To appreciate their collaboration is to recognise how Leane elevated jewellery from expressions of mechanical skill to narrative devices on par with McQueen’s garments. The pair’s ascension in fashion’s pantheon is akin to their first meeting: swift, precipitous, and unforgettable.

When opening the invitation to Alexander McQueen’s 1995 fall show Highland Rape, invitees were faced with an image of a scar. Raw, several inches long, and crudely held together by surgical sutures, the premise of the scar was unclear: Was McQueen inspiring hope or harm?

McQueen asked Leane to create silver-chained watches for Highland Rape in exchange for clothing. Leane’s designs drew heavily from Victorian fob watches and, while simplistic in design, their presentation was somewhat inflammatory for their affiliation with onanism. In one model’s look, watches were paired with a calf-length tartan skirt with slash-pockets and a rear zip. Silver chains encircled another model's legs, pulling her skirt's seat taut against her derrière, reshaping the garment into pseudo-trousers. Considering McQueen’s critique of England’s anti-Scottish sentiment, Leane’s watches operated as largely decorative in line with traditional accessories. In his 2025 book Searching for the Sublime, Curator Andrew Bolton recalls how Isabella Blow (McQueen's stylist and close friend who purchased his entire graduate collection) felt satisfied when wearing Leane's watch, which threaded from her posterior to her crotch. The watches appeared elsewhere, dangling from models' undergarments and splayed against their pants and skirts like tampon strings. This collaboration glimpsed at the pair's future work together and foreshadowed the subversive elements that would come to underline their shared simpatico.

Leane’s covert storytelling turned overt in McQueen’s 1996 Fall collection, Dante. In Dante Alighieri’s 14th century Inferno, love serves as an award for enduring the trials of hell. Interpreting the Florentine poet’s vision, Leane chose to celebrate the tension between sin and sacrifice. He harnessed the composite history of Catholic imagery and the gravitas of The Divine Comedy to express the importance of didactic jewellery. His pieces gave form to McQueen’s belief that man was attracted to chaos, expressed in his sentiment, “I think religion has caused every war in the world.”

In the months preceding the Dante show, McQueen faced financial restraint and had to minimise costs. Leane was thereby asked to use alternative, cheaper materials like brass, silver and aluminium, despite his affiliation with goldsmithing. Leane has described these pieces, especially the thorned jewellery ensnaring the models’ bodies, as some of his most significant creations for McQueen.

Down the cruciform Dante catwalk came model Honor Fraser, Leane’s ‘Crown of Thorns’ fixed above her brow. Rendered in silver, it was an obvious reference to Christ’s circlet on the day of his crucifixion. Intrusive and delicate, the pieces were crucial in conveying to audiences what McQueen’s garments alone could not.

Leane’s 'Thorn Arm Vine' piece similarly responded to McQueen’s denouncement of religion and violence. Twining around the models’ arms and shoulders, the thorns resembled concertina wire, often seen in military fencing. Leane had commented that the armbands also symbolised nature’s reclamation of the body after death. The wiry vines, vein-like in their fluidity, remind us of the belief that we are created from earth and to earth we shall return.

The dramaturgical role of jewellery was amplified in McQueen's AW97 show, It’s a Jungle Out There. The defining feature of the show was not the womenswear garments (which were delayed at Heathrow Airport for 48 hours), or McQueen's infamous spat with Naomi Campbell that cost her a place on the catwalk, or the prop car that burst into flames. Rather, it was the coiled metallic neckpieces, known as the 'Coiled Collar', that clasped the models’ necks.

The neckpieces drew inspiration from the body ornaments Burmese tribal women used to extend their necks with. On one hand, such adornments commanded reverence as symbols of wealth and status. On the other, their modifying properties were considered questionable, even disturbing.

The neck pieces included more than twenty layers of metal coils, each wrapped around the neck to distort the model’s proportions and place pressure on their clavicle. Claire Wilcox, Professor in Fashion Curation at the London University of the Arts, states apropos to McQueen and Leane’s approach: "It is always about pushing to the extreme—the human body, human nature. As a designer, you’re always working with cutting up the body to different proportions and different shapes. This is what a designer’s job is—to transcend what fashion is and what it could be." The friction of opposing forces blurred the line between beauty and grotesque: the heavy metal coils were offset by the delicacy of the décolletage.

When evaluating the pinnacle of Leane's career, his 'Spine Corset' stands as a strong contender. The discussion for the corset first took place in a dingy Islington pub, where McQueen approached Leane with the initial concept. Sceptical at first, Leane was unabashedly transfixed and spent the following nights sleepless, wondering how such a feat would be possible. The answer came to him in the form of wax moulds and cast aluminium.

The body of the corset was cast in a mould based on a genuine human vertebra, while the rib bones were handcrafted by Leane. After watching Richard Donner’s 1976 horror film The Omen, in which a jackal gives birth to a child, McQueen reportedly asked Leane to include a tail. Unable to refuse McQueen’s vision of hybrid grotesques, he obliged.

When worn, the corset takes on the appearance of exoskeletal armour. In McQueen’s 1997 show Untitled (previously Golden Shower), the 'Spine Corset' competed with McQueen’s garments with their symbolic weight and spectacle. The corset was layered atop a glittering black dress, bringing the human skeleton to the surface. Leane's interpretation of the ribs, secured by leather buckle-straps, resembles a cage, symbolising McQueen's disdain for mortality.  

The 'Spine Corset' gave rise to several ancillary jewellery pieces of note, particularly the ‘Rose Corset’, ‘Yashmak‘ and 'Jaw Bone’. When the latter was worn, it looked as if layers of skin and muscle had been peeled away from the face to reveal the bones and teeth beneath. Of the 'Jaw Bone' Leane reflected: “The skeleton corset was already on the way and being made. I had carved the vertebrae and the ribs, and they were away being cast, but as I researched more and more into bones and [found] resins of bones, medical skeletons, I came across a jaw bone and just play[ed] with it, look[ed] at it and stud[ied] it. I actually put it up against my face and it looked really powerful on the outside.”

Leane's jewellery and McQueen's garments coexist as instruments of an overarching story, equal and unable to exist without the other. Nearly thirty years after Highland Rape, almost fifteen since McQueen’s passing, and two months since Leane’s retirement, the designers' talent endures. As Leane told Dezeen, “Alexander McQueen changed fashion, and I changed jewellery.”