Alexander McQueen

For most houses, the fashion show is a sales mechanism: clothes walk, buyers watch, orders follow. McQueen treated the show as a form in its own right, closer to performance art or avant-garde installation than to a sales presentation. The clothes mattered enormously, but they lived inside a staged world that told a story, and that story often did the emotional heavy lifting.

The examples became legend. In one show a model stood on a turntable in a plain white dress while two industrial robots, the kind used on car assembly lines, sprayed her with black and yellow paint as she shielded herself. In another, a hologram of Kate Moss appeared to float and dissolve inside a glass pyramid, summoned and then gone. There were shows staged in the rain, behind a wall of glass, on a chessboard, inside a circle of fire. The environments were not decoration; they framed how the clothes were meant to be read.

The retrospective took its title from a phrase McQueen liked: savage beauty. The pairing is the key to the whole sensibility. He was not interested in the pretty, the flattering, the merely tasteful. He wanted beauty that carried an edge of danger, decay, or wildness — beauty that unsettled even as it seduced. A dress could be exquisite and frightening at once, and for McQueen that tension was the point, not a problem to be smoothed away.

You can see the idea worked out in the materials and motifs. He returned again and again to the natural world, but not its gentle side: predators, skeletons, feathers, shells, antlers, the imagery of the hunt. Skulls became almost a signature. He drew on the Romantic tradition, on Gothic imagery, on Scottish history and his own Highland ancestry, and on a fascination with the relationship between the human and the animal, the living and the dead. The clothes asked the wearer to inhabit something larger and stranger than themselves.

Step back from any single garment and a larger ambition comes into view. McQueen used fashion as a medium for ideas — about race, class, sexuality, religion, and increasingly the environment — in a way the industry had rarely seen. The runway was his place to think out loud, and the subjects he chose were not the usual fare of glamour.

Class ran through everything, partly because it was his own story. The taxi driver's son who learned to cut suits for the rich never lost his awareness of the gap between the East End and the salons of Mayfair, and his work kept staging encounters between high craft and the raw, the broken, the working body. His Highland collections returned to the violence of Scottish history and the way England had treated the Scots, turning a personal heritage into a statement about power and dispossession. Other shows engaged with colonial history, with religious iconography, with gender and the male and female body, refusing to present any of them as settled or safe.

The young cutter Isabella Blow spotted in 1992 became, by common consent, the most imaginative and provocative designer of his generation. The path ran from the apprentice benches of Savile Row, through the rigour of Paris couture, to runways that swarmed with moths and burned with fire — and the through-line was always there. The craft made the visions possible; the visions gave the craft a reason to exist. Beauty, for McQueen, was never meant to reassure.