Bad boy of British fashion McQueen found dead

Flamboyant British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found dead at his London home yesterday, police and reports said.

Emergency services were called to the 40-year-old's home in central London and he was pronounced dead at the scene, while Scotland Yard said the death was not being treated as suspicious. Reports said he had hanged himself.

Mr McQueen, a four-time winner of the British designer of the year award, was creative director of his own label which was bought out by Gucci and was one of Britain's most lauded fashion designers.

His death came days before London fashion week, and ahead of Paris fashion week next month. Media reports said his mother Joyce died last week, and in a comment on Mr McQueen's Twitter page on Sunday he wrote that he had had an "awful week, but my friends have been great, but now I have to somehow pull myself together."

The Times newspaper reported that his mother was to be buried tomorrow.

Mr McQueen's close friend and fashion icon Isabella Blow killed herself three years ago at the age of 48. Suffering from cancer and depression, she died of a drug overdose after telling friends she was going out shopping.

German couture legend Karl Lagerfeld said: "I knew him very little but knew his work, which brought him a lot of success. I found his work very interesting and never banal. There was always some attraction to death, his designs were sometimes dehumanised. Who knows, perhaps after flirting with death too often, death attracts you."

As the body was brought out of his home on a stretcher, covered in a red blanket, and loaded into a private ambulance, a man with short blond hair, who identified himself as Mr McQueen's boyfriend but did not give his name, was seen in tears, speaking on his mobile phone.

Born in London's East End into a working-class family - his father was a taxi driver - Alexander McQueen rose to fame after graduating from St Martin's in 1991. He cut his teeth as a tailor in Savile Row, where legend has it that he left his distinctive mark - in the form of hand-written obscenities - in the lining of a jacket for Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.