Follow the Line, 1997. Image courtesy of Ann Ray and Barrett Barrera Projects

The year was 1996, and a young upstart named Lee Alexander McQueen took the helm of Givenchy as head designer at just 27 years old. French photographer Ann Ray stepped inside his fantastical world, spending two weeks with him while he was creating his first couture collection that same year.

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“I had to move to London, so Lee asked me to photograph his collections and basically, I never stopped,” Ray tells AnOther while visiting New York. The result was a lifelong friendship and creative collaboration that would continue until his tragic death at the age of 40 in 2010. Given unprecedented access to document his design process and behind-the-scenes moments during his legendary runway shows, Ray spent 12-hour days in the atelier over a period of 13 years, making more than 35,000 photographs that capture the complexity of McQueen: the man, the artist, and the iconoclast.

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Now, in the new exhibition Ann Ray & Lee McQueen: Rendez-Vous, Ray reveals a portrait of the artist as a young man ascending to the heights of fashion by breaking all the rules to create an avant-garde spectacular replete with theater, performance art, and gothic fairytales. Here, Ray shares her memories of life in the inner circle, sharing a side of McQueen that only those closest to him ever knew.

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Read the Full Story at AnOther

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Home, 2000 Image courtesy of Ann Ray and Barrett Barrera Projects