Getty Images: Steve Russell/Contributor
Steve McQueen at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 2011.
The British artist and film director used to work part-time at fashion and food store Marks & Spencer, leaving only in 1995 when someone paid him “loads of money for a film.” It was cash well spent. In 1999, he won the Tate’s Turner Prize for his film Deadpan—a tribute to the silent movie star Buster Keaton—and later an Academy Award and a BAFTA for his 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave. As a young man at school in London, he wore an eyepatch, but today he is known for his geek-chic black-framed glasses and casual panache. In 2017, Edward Enninful made him a contributing editor at British Vogue, and his appointment lends gravitas and intelligence to the magazine’s style-pages—not that McQueen’s directing and artwork leave him much time to think about fashion, despite looking debonair on the red carpet. “To me it’s about the work; it’s the only thing one can do,” he explained in a Guardian interview in 2014. His work since 12 Years a Slave includes Ashes, a 2014 film about a young boy murdered in Grenada, and the installation Weight, a prison bunk bed draped in a 24-carat-gold-plated mosquito net, which was part of the exhibition Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (2016)—an homage to Oscar Wilde, who spent two years incarcerated.