It amazes me! Perhaps it reached a tipping point and became so iconic that everyone affected by McQueen’s work wanted to have it. Despite these heartfelt declarations of his Scottish national identity, McQueen also had a deep interest in the history of England. This was most apparent, perhaps, in The Girl Who Lived in the Tree (Autumn/Winter 2008), inspired by an elm tree in the garden of McQueen’s country home near Fairlight Cove in East Sussex. Influenced by the British Empire, and drawing on a recent trip to India it was one of McQueen’s most romantically nationalistic collections, albeit heavily tinged with irony and pastiche.

McQueen developed a host of new shapes, tailored to mimic marine features: pronounced hips and shoulders gave way to amorphous forms; a fluted miniskirt resembled the folds of a jellyfish; puffed sleeves were folded and pleated to connote gills. I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I'm dead and gone people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.' More people can understand the dress if it's tarnished and distressed. If you walked out in the first dress you'd be setting yourself apart form everyone but if you wore the second one people would be able to accept you. I find that untouchable Hollywood glamour alienating. It has no relevance to the way I live my life. Remember where you came from. The second dress is beautiful in a different and more authentic way. Bolton chose not to include any biographical information in the original New York Savage Beauty because he felt that McQueen’s life was “laid bare in his work for all to see”. There is a purity to this approach and it is surely true that our appreciation of McQueen’s art is not enhanced by knowing the details of his nights – and days, come to that – of drinking and drug-taking, the fights with various boyfriends, the liposuction he resorted to in a desperate attempt to slim down to a more fashionable weight. There is, however, one fact about McQueen’s life that emerges from Andrew Wilson’s biography as a possible key to his creative vision as well as to his final depression. Though not as authoritative as Thomas’s book on McQueen’s place in the world of fashion, Wilson had the benefit of interviews with the designer’s family, which makes his biography the more intimate and affecting of the two. At the age of nine or 10, McQueen started to be sexually abused by a violent man – Terence Anthony Huyler – who was married to his sister Janet. When he later confided in Blow, he said that this man stole his innocence. The young McQueen also watched powerless on several occasions when Janet was beaten or half-strangled by Huyler. Janet, who had no idea that her husband was abusing her little brother, remained close to McQueen all his life, almost like a second mother. Wilson convincingly argues that Janet became “the blueprint” for his clothes, a woman who was “vulnerable but strong”. Sometimes the women on the runway were McQueen himself, other times they were Janet. This, writes Wilson, “was the woman he wanted to protect and empower through his clothes; the patina of armour that he created for her would shield her from danger”.Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonBut for McQueen, as it was for the Romantics, nature was also a locus for ideas and concepts. He frequently played upon the transformative powers of clothing. In The Widows of Culloden (Autumn/Winter 2006) a dress created entirely from pheasant feathers imbued the wearer with an avian beauty, while a razor clam shell encrusted dress from VOSS (Spring/Summer 2001) formed a brittle carapace. Sarabande (Spring/Summer 2007) incorporated both silk and real flowers, which withered as they fell onto the catwalk. The collection featured a number of exoticised garments, including a coat and a dress appliquéd with roundels in the shape of chrysanthemums. A fragile, blood-red glass and ostrich feather gown offered a meditation on life's transience, while a thermal image of the designer's face was woven into the fabric of a silk coat. Alexander McQueen’s fascination with the elemental—earth, wind, fire and water—imbued his collections with primordial drama. Nature and its materials were a constant in McQueen’s work. I found it to be pretty fascinating stuff - it is kind of amazing the reactions that some of the pictures can evoke. One of the defining features of Alexander McQueen’s collections was their historicism. While McQueen’s historical references were far- reaching, he was particularly inspired by the nineteenth century, drawing especially on the Victorian Gothic. ‘There’s something kind of Edgar Allan Poe,’ he once observed, ‘kind of deep and kind of melancholic about my collections.’

And Alexander McQueen.. well...he was a Pisces...Martian meets Surrealist meets Tailor meets Romantic. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. That's mundane and it's old hat. Let's break down some barriers.'

The final images, which kept the hands and eliminated the hardware, worked. Their focus is on the clothing, and the garments look natural because they were photographed on living bodies. The shots are dramatic and better reflect how McQueen’s clothes are made to be seen. Since the exhibition, there have been many books published on McQueen. I thought ours might be surpassed, but it remains a benchmark. Garrels, Gary, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff, editors; preface by Karl Ove Knausgaard; essays by Patricia G. Berman, Allison Morehead, Savage Mind ‘You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.’

As evolution advanced and each model charted the progression from life on land to life under the sea, their features changed. Hair was either plaited tight to the head in mounds or sculpted into fin-like peaks, while the contours of models’ faces were distorted with prosthetic enhancements, both features connoting biological adaptation. Colours and textures shifted with the transition from species to species. Camouflage prints of roses, and jacquards depicting moths in green and brown tones, referenced life above the sea; amphibious snake prints suggested a transition to water; and designs in blues and purples incorporated images of ocean creatures, such as stingrays and jellyfish. Here McQueen perfected the use of digital printing techniques with each design engineered specifically for individual garments. It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within.’ Alexander McQueen's dashing creativity was expressed through the technical artistry of his designs and the dramatic intensity of his fashion shows. Drawing on avant-garde installation and performance art, these were also emphatically autobiographical. McQueen fearlessly challenged the conventions of fashion. Rare among designers, he saw beyond clothing's physical constraints to its conceptual and imaginative possibilities.As a place for inspiration Britain is the best in the world. You’re inspired by the anarchy in the country.’

Cinematic references to sci-fi and fantasy films including Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) and John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) found expression not only in aspects such as the show invitation and colour palette but also shoe designs. The models stalked the catwalk in 25 cm heels, the 3D printed ‘Alien’ design inspired by the artwork of H.R. Giger (a member of the special effects team for Alien). The ‘Armadillo’ boot created a form entirely without apparent reference to the natural anatomy of the foot, the scaly surface of designs rendered in python skin invoking the armoured shell of the animal after which the shoe was named. I took advantage of the extra hour to see the exhibit at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, and skip the queue which was two hours long when I came out at 10:00 a.m.! (That doesn't include the queue to get into the museum..). Six hours after and still processing, I summed up for friends: Burton, Bosch, Braveheart, beads, bones, birds, brutal, beautiful.. Bravo! Alexander McQueen consistently promoted freedom of thought and expression, and championed the authority of the imagination. In this, he was an exemplar of the Romantic individual, the hero-artist who staunchly followed the dictates of his inspiration. 'What I am trying to bring to fashion is a sort of originality', he once commented.To quote from the introduction of the book itself, "The latest in a long line of male homosexual designers who exploit women while pandering to their own fantasies." As with any works of art in The Met collection, the staff preserves and protects all accessioned costumes from deterioration. For this reason, no one may wear a garment after it enters the collection. You were able to photograph McQueen’s works on live models because they weren’t accessioned Museum objects, right? With over 340,000 copies sold, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty remains an indispensable perspective on the groundbreaking fashion designer.