Russell Tovey and Olivia Colman will star in Wild Bird, a new short directed by Andrew Haigh about one of British fashion’s most mythic creative relationships
Fashion history is full of people who found each other before the world understood what they were looking at. Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen were one of those pairings: a stylist and editor with an almost supernatural eye for talent, and a young designer whose work seemed to arrive already carrying beauty, violence, grief, and theatrical force.
Now, their relationship is being brought to the screen in Wild Bird, a new short film directed by Andrew Haigh, the filmmaker behind All of Us Strangers. The film will star Russell Tovey as McQueen and Olivia Colman as Blow, with Tovey also writing the screenplay.
Rather than attempting a full biopic, Wild Bird imagines a road trip between the two figures, focusing on the charged emotional terrain of their bond. Blow famously bought McQueen’s entire graduate collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, in 1992, becoming one of his earliest and most important champions. Their friendship later became more complicated, especially as McQueen’s career accelerated and he was appointed head designer at Givenchy.
That is what makes the story so compelling. Blow did not simply “discover” McQueen in the flat, industry-approved sense of the word. She seemed to recognise something in him before the machinery of fashion had fully caught up: the danger, the brilliance, the wounded grandeur. McQueen, in turn, became one of the defining designers of his generation, turning the runway into a place where beauty could feel brutal, wounded, erotic, and sublime.
With Haigh directing, the project seems likely to lean into intimacy rather than spectacle. His best work is often about emotional residue: the things people cannot say cleanly, the ghosts that remain inside relationships, the ache of connection after it has already begun to fracture. That makes him a fascinating choice for a story about McQueen and Blow, whose friendship has always carried the atmosphere of devotion, dependency, admiration, and loss.
Tovey has described McQueen as someone he has long wanted to portray, while also speaking of the designer’s artistry and presence as a lifelong fascination. Colman, meanwhile, feels like a natural fit for Blow: a performer capable of warmth, eccentricity, intelligence, fragility, and steel within the same breath.
The title, Wild Bird, feels apt. Both McQueen and Blow occupied fashion like figures slightly too intense for the cages built around them. They understood performance, costume, glamour, and pain not as separate things, but as part of the same mythology.