“Little white flowers will never awaken you, not where the dark coach of sorrow has taken you.”

The haunting voice of Icelandic singer Björk reverberated through St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on Monday, September 20th at a grand memorial service for the late Lee Alexander McQueen.

Björk poured into the song a sense of loss, and the demons that haunted the British designer.

Speakers at the service exalted McQueen’s imagination and technical prowess, but didn’t shy away from his dark side, his fascination with the macabre, his salty humor and his acid tongue.

“It was a life lived in the public gaze, but it was as vulnerable and retiring as it was glamorous,” the Reverend Canon Giles Fraser told the 1,200 guests, who included Sarah Jessica Parker, Daphne Guinness, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Stella McCartney, Hussein Chalayan and many more.

Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune said about McQueen “he was an artist who just happened to work with clothing.”

Read the original post here on WWD.