By Michael Ventura
DNAinfo Senior Editor
MANHATTAN — Alexander McQueen, the designer beloved by Manhattan's fashionistas, hanged himself after taking a mix of cocaine, tranquilizers and sleeping pills, a coroner's report said.
McQueen, who had a boutique in the Meatpacking District, was found in his London apartment on Feb. 11, as New York's Fashion Week got underway. The date was also the eve of McQueen's mother's funeral — a loss that left him devastated.
"The balance of his mind was disturbed," the coroner, Dr. Paul Knapman, said in his report, according to the BBC. "It seems that he had a history of self-harm and, no doubt fueled by cocaine, he resorted to desperate measures to end his life."
The report was read in Westminster Coroner's Court, which heard Wednesday that McQueen, who also went by "Lee," had a history of anxiety and insomnia and had researched suicide on the Internet, the BBC reported.
"He certainly felt very pressured by his work, but it was a double-edged sword,"McQueen's psychiatrist Dr Stephen Pereira told the court, according to the news service. "He felt it was the only area of his life where he felt he had achieved something. Usually after a show he felt a huge come-down. He felt isolated, it gave him a huge low."
The loss of his mother only drove him lower, coroner's officials said.
McQueen behind a suicide note, scrawled on the back of "The Decent of Man" by Charles Darwin, Vogue reported.
"Look after my dogs, sorry, I love you, Lee," the note concluded, the BBC said.
"He always followed his heart," Jesse Wang, a design school grad and McQueen fan, told DNAinfo back in February at a makeshift memorial outside the designer's Manhattan store. "He is an inspiration.
