How McQueen's "Tinkerbell" Annabelle Neilson made her mark on the '90s fashion scene

The society darling, bestie to Kate and Naomi, and model for Galliano and McQueen will be missed by many
Chloe Street17 July 2018

She was the muse to McQueen and Galliano who went on to star in TV reality show Ladies of London.

But today the fashion world reacted in shock to the loss of Annabelle Neilson, an original member of the hard-partying 90s Primrose Hill set, found dead in her Chelsea apartment last week.

The aristocrat daughter of the Marquesa Campus di Santinelli, Neilson had a difficult childhood before she discovered modelling in her early twenties.

At the age of 22 she was introduced to Alexander McQueen by the late Tatler fashion editor Isabella Blow, and quickly became his muse and close friend.

“Issie brought me to Lee as a model,” Neilson told the Daily Mail in 2015. “She presented me to him as his new girl. Lee loved me immediately and it felt like we knew each other straight away.”

“We were so alike,” she continued. “He was my brother, my boyfriend, my soulmate. Most of the time people called me Mrs. McQueen."

Annabelle with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Alexander McQueen
NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

Neilson became one of the original members of the Primrose Hill set, forging close relationships with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell and walking alongside them in McQueen and Galliano’s runway shows in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2000 she appeared twice in Vogue’s portfolio, “How Many People Does It Take to Make a Dress?” depicting designers and their support groups. “These are my true friends, people I’ve known since I was 17,” Galliano told Vogue. “They represent everything divine: music, fun, parties, dance, decadence.”

Neilson, the waifish, hard-partying adventure sports lover, definitely fit that description. And for McQueen, who referred to her as “Tinkerbell” and whose clothes were wild and risqué, Neilson made the perfect muse. ‘I remember our first shoot together when Lee had made me thiseexquisite torn lace navy dress that fitted perfectly,” she told the Daily Mail in 2015. “When it turned up on the day of the shoot he’d sprayed it silver and it had shrunk. I had to be gaffer-taped into it.”

She wore his sheer cobweb sheaths to dance on tables with Kate and Naomi and Monte Carlo, and custom McQueen catsuits to race cars in the Himalayas in 2001. “One was white, with McQueen stitched on the back in pink leather and pink piping down the side and a pink belt,” she told W magazine. “I was in a zebra car. Honestly, they’d never seen anything like it.”

“He liked my wackiness—and the fact that when I went out, I made his outfits live,” she told W in 2012.

Mary Charteris and Annabelle Neilson walk in Pam Hogg show, Spring Summer 2014
Rex Features

When the McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition moved from New York to open in London in March 2010, Neilson spoke to Vogue: "For those of us who were closest to Lee, the [New York instalment of the] Met exhibition came a little too soon. Losing him was still so raw, whereas now we all feel a little readier to celebrate Lee's life. His early work, when his resources were limited, almost expresses him best. Those early pieces will show that the genius was there already in its simplest, most beautiful form."

She continued to roll with a fashionable crowd in more recent years. On Valentine’s Day last year she posted pictures of herself and Kate Moss snuggling in bed, and the last picture she featured in was posted by Poppy Delevingne, and features the pair posing with Alice Temperley, Kimi Hammerstroem and Kate Moss at the wedding of her ex-boyfriend, Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire just last week.

See below for some of Annabelle Neilson’s most fashionable moments:

With John Galliano and Vanessa Perander at a Vogue fashion evening in Monte Carlo
Rex Features
With Naomi Campbell at Kate Moss's 30th in 2004
Rex Features
With Daphne Guinness and Alexander McQueen, 2004
Richard Young, Rex Features
With Mary Charteris at Pamm Hogg show, 2014
Rex Features
With Kate Moss at Rivoli afterparty in 2004
Rex Features
Kate Moss, Annabelle Neilson and Stella McCartney at the funeral of Alexander Lee McQueen in Knightsbridge, London, February 2010
Rex Features
Costume Institute Gala Benefit, Celebrating 'Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, America, 2011
Rex Features
Roisin Murphy, Mary Charteris, Alice Dellal and Annabelle Neilson walk the catwalk with Pam Hogg
Rex Features

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