This week we all heard the sad news that fashion designer L'Wren Scott was found hanged in an apparent suicide in her New York apartment on Monday.
Although a successful fashion designer in her own right and professional model before this, Scott's suicide has received so much press coverage mostly down to the fact she happened to be Mick Jagger's girlfriend for the past 13 years. Feminists worldwide have been criticising the way in which her death has been reported, appalled at the fact she was identified as being the WAG of a rock star before she was described as being a well-known fashion designer.
In an interview with the Times last year, Scott said “I’m a fashion designer. I don’t want to be defined as someone’s girlfriend.”
Multiple newspapers including the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and the Daily Star pictured Mick Jagger's shocked face after receiving the news of her death on their front pages rather than pictures of L'Wren herself.
Although we may never know the exact motives behind Scott making the decision to take her own life, we can speculate that the way in which her identity never quite stood up on it's own despite years of toil and hard work, may have had something to do with it.
Her business was almost £6 million in debt, a sum that Mick Jagger could clear with a night's wages, yet Scott was too headstrong to allow him to help her financially - a decision which lots of people would be perplexed by, and yet for Scott it was important for her to make her own success story and to not allow her partner's fortune to have to pay off her business's shortcomings. That's the thing with creative people - they are proud and unrelenting when it comes to their art. The fact that Scott's debt could be easily wiped by her partner does not cancel out the fact that her business was failing, or falling short of her expectations. This was ultimately too much to bear for L'Wren who took such drastic action to exit the situation. Many people may think that a rich partner may be the end of their problems, others would happily give up their vocation entirely and spend their days following the Rolling Stones about the world but for Scott, this was not enough. She did not want to live in Mick Jagger's shadow and seemed to be constantly battling to carve her own path, evident as much in the reportage of her life as in the reportage of her death.
Despite it's financial troubles, there is nothing else to suggest that L'Wren's label was anything short of successful, her designs were worn by the likes of Madonna, Angelina Jolie and Michelle Obama at red carpet events. Her eye for fashion was built up over years of experience collaborating with designers and dressing her clients personally. Her love for fashion began when she was a teenager and decided to make her own clothes which fitted her tall frame perfectly. She worked as a model in Paris for some time but was always more interested in the artistry behind dressmaking rather than walking the runway. She then moved to LA and worked as a stylist, creative director for fashion advertising campaigns and as a costume designer for film before turning her hand to design.
Scott's brand has been running for the last five years and has been stocked in the most exclusive retailers all over the world. She named each collection with a unique name, rather than pandering to the usual notion of seasons, for example Little Black Dress - a collection entirely in black which focused on wearable, plain pieces. In her time Scott also designed make-up, eyewear, handbags and perfume, all encapsulating her philosophy of timeless style and femininity.
If we can learn one thing from Scott's untimely and tragic death it's that our own personal creative journeys should always be valued as our greatest achievements, not who we manage to ensnare romantically, that does not define a person nor should it be the way in which we identify people.
Scott is a sad example of how seriously a creative person can take their art, and how it's failure can have devastating consequences. Her biography on her website has no name check of jagger, and nor should her obituatury before her creative achivements have been acknowledged.
