Every collection told a story. When you watched one of McQueen’s collections, you were always having these feelings of awe or wonder or fear or terror. My personal opinion was that McQueen was channeling the Sublime through his collections. And certainly the Sublime experience was something that certainly affected the audience. You were always not sure what to expect when you went into a McQueen show. And you also didn’t know what you felt when you left a McQueen show at the same time. You always were left with sort of feelings of confusion, and McQueen often said that he didn’t care whether you liked his collections or not, as long as you felt something. And the intensity of his collections came from the fact that it was often very much about his state of mind at a particular time. For McQueen the runway was primarily a vehicle to express his imagination. He was very dark. That darkness came from a deep romanticism—the darkest side of the nineteenth century—and that’s what I always felt when I saw his collections. He was deeply political as a designer and I think one of the reasons why McQueen’s collections often were so hard to watch is that they often channeled our cultural anxieties and uncertainties, and that was very much part of his raison d’être.

McQueen was well known for upending conventional, normative standards of beauty. He would dress women up in garments that obliterated their features. And certainly the garments that he made can be interpreted as being misogynistic. I think that he felt as if the clothes he was designing for women were armor. So in his mind his clothes were very much to do with empowerment. Fashion wasn’t just about pragmatics; it wasn’t just about wearability. To him, fashion was a vehicle to convey or express complex ideas and complex concepts, but also could use fashion as a way to challenge our boundaries of what we think of as clothing and think about in terms of the requisites or fundamentals of clothing.

This iconic moment comes from the collection La Poupée, which in French means “doll” or “puppet.” This particular moment involved the model Debra Shaw wearing a manacle. When she walked down the runway, she was constrained by her elbows and her knees. Seeing her walking down the runway with these movements that looked so painful was very difficult to watch at the time. McQueen always denied the fact that it had any connotations of slavery and referenced the fact that the collection itself was inspired by the artist Hans Bellmer’s dolls. But when you first saw it, it was unavoidable to see the undertones of slavery.

This collection is called Untitled. It ended with a series of models walking down the runway being drenched in water. The water was lit with yellow light to give the impression of a golden shower. McQueen originally titled the collection Golden Showers, but because it has pornographic connotations, the sponsor, American Express, objected to the title, and McQueen changed it to Untitled, an ironic reference to titles given to art.

This collection was called Joan. McQueen didn’t really have muses. He was often inspired by women throughout history—people like Catherine the Great, Marie Antoinette, and in this case Joan of Arc. He liked women who he called “doomed women.” The finale of this particular collection involved a woman walking down the runway styled like molten ash that has solidified. And at the end of it, she had centered herself on the catwalk and a ring of fire sprung up around her. The collection itself had many references to Joan of Arc—garments that were made out of chainmail, but also garments inspired by menswear. Joan of Arc was famous for contravening the conventions of gender in her dress. McQueen rarely used supermodels, beyond Kate Moss. He preferred models who were not that well known, or if they were, he liked disguising their features on the runway with treatments that in a way obliterated their identities. So this particular piece is quite typical of McQueen in terms of the fact that it is covering her face. We are totally unaware of who the actual model is. He did really want the artist to focus more on the artistry of the clothes, rather than the identity of the model.

This show was inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, and it ended with the model Shalom Harlow rotating on a turntable, wearing a white dress, being spray-painted by two industrial robots. Shalom Harlow trained as a ballerina. It is often said that the inspiration behind the collection was the dying swan, but in actual fact the inspiration came from an installation by the artist Rebecca Horn of two machine guns firing paint at each other.

This collection is another example of McQueen being inspired by a film. It’s called The Overlook, which was the name of the hotel in The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. This collection was actually staged almost like a huge snow globe. The snowstorm is physically referenced in the clothes themselves, whether you see a crystal top, or whether it’s actually a dress that is designed to look like a snowflake. In the middle there was actually an ice skating rink. This is a good example of McQueen using the runway as theater. Two characters that featured prominently were two redheaded identical twins, a reference to the twins that appeared in the film The Shining.

This collection is called Eye, and what’s interesting about it is that it was actually staged on the evening when Hurricane Floyd hit America. Most designers canceled their runway presentations, but McQueen felt that the hurricane added to the drama and spectacle. It was a show that was inspired by Islam, and the finale ended with models wearing burkas flying over the runway, which had been morphed into a bed of nails. McQueen’s collections often channeled our cultural anxieties and uncertainties.

This comes from a collection, VOSS, and this was a good example of McQueen using the conceit of a box within a box within a box. As the audience sat down, they were confronted by a large mirrored box, so that the audience made up of fashion editors would look directly at their reflections in the glass. As the collection commenced, the lights went down in the audience, and the lights went on in the box. The collection ended with the box, which had been there the entire time, and you only saw fluttering sort of things in the actual box, but as the walls of the box came crashing down, it revealed the fetish writer Michelle Olley, staged in a pose that was inspired by the Joel-Peter Witkin photograph Sanitarium. The collection itself was really a statement of the politics of appearance. McQueen was well known for upending conventional standards of beauty, and in this particular case, he was celebrating the idea of difference. For fashion editors to confront an image of a woman who’s not conventionally considered attractive was something that was particularly resonant in this collection.

Read Michelle Olley’s perspective on appearing in the runway show.

This collection is called What a Merry-Go-Round. It references the darker sides of the fairground. It was staged on a merry-go-round outside of a Victorian toy shop. The music referenced the voice of the child-catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And the makeup artist for this particular collection, as for many of McQueen’s collections, was Val Garland, and there are extremely macabre interpretations of clown makeup, with their white, pallid faces, and the whole feeling of the collection had the very sinister quality of a clown at a child’s birthday party.

McQueen, as well as being a fashion designer, art-directed many photoshoots, he art-directed many films, and this film formed the backdrop to the collection Irere that told the story of a shipwreck at sea and a subsequent landfall in the Amazon. And it was peopled with characters like pirates, conquistadors, and Amazonian Indians. The film itself was shot by John Maybury and depicts a moment when a woman falls overboard in a dress that’s referred to as the “shipwreck dress.” As she’s floating down in the ocean, the strands of chiffon get tangled around her legs and arms like seaweed.

This collection is called Scanners. The invitations to this particular collection were brain scans, and the brain scans were actually of McQueen’s own brain scans when he was born. And the actual set was inspired by an Antarctic tundra. Above the tundra, two models were shown struggling against the wind. One of them was wearing a white parachute, and one we see here was wearing an oversized kimono. The elements featured very highly in McQueen’s collections and in his runway presentations. The wind was just another manifestation of McQueen’s deep engagement with nature and the natural environment.

This collection actually has two names based on the two films that inspired it. One was Deliverance by John Boorman and the other was They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Sydney Pollack. The staging of the collection was based on Sydney Pollack’s film. It showed a Depression-era dance marathon, choreographed by the dancer Michael Clark. It had three chapters. The first chapter showed women in pristine garments dancing the tango and other various dances. The second act presented a frenetic derby, in which the models and dancers ran around in a circle in this frenzy, and the garments they were wearing were much more sporty. And the final act had the models and dancers in utter exhaustion being dragged around the dance floor, just as they were about to collapse. The scene you’re seeing here is the model Karen Elson, with utter fatigue, being dragged around as she’s about to expire.

This collection is called It’s Only a Game and was inspired by Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock. The collection itself was staged as a chess game, and the inspiration for the chess game came from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Girls walked onto the runway as particular pieces of the chess game. The lead characters of the chess games, in terms of the clothing, were very apparent. And one of the most distinctive pieces was the knight. She was wearing a leather cuirass with a skirt that was made out of horsehair. Her head was covered with a harness and a ponytail that looked like a horse’s tail. And the two queens were actually wearing garments that were inspired by the eighteenth-century panniers, with a wide-hipped silhouette. And the two kings were actually in American footballer outfits with wide shoulder pads and American football helmets.

McQueen was deeply inspired by film throughout his career—Hitchcock, most famously, in collections like Birds—but he was also inspired by films which seemed less artistically driven, like The Green Mile. The finale of the actual collection was a checkmate between the two rival teams, meant to represent Japan on one side and America on the other.

This hologram of Kate Moss was the finale to the collection Widows of Culloden, and this was an example of a collection that was profoundly autobiographical. Widows of Culloden referred to the last battle of the Jacobite Risings between the Scotts and the Brits and referenced McQueen’s Scottish heritage. What was interesting about this particular ending was that it references a nineteenth-century practice called “Pepper’s ghost,” a device that gives the illusion of a spirit, often used in séances in the nineteenth century. And his choice of model here is interesting. He chose Kate Moss at a time when major design companies were dropping her because of the cocaine scandal, which McQueen always felt was deeply hypocritical. So his choice was political. Part of McQueen’s interest in Scottish history, beyond his own Scottish legacy, was the fact that he always reacted against romantic images of Scotland, which were all about tartan or haggis. When he did reference his Scottish heritage, it usually was in relationship to its turbulent political history.

This collection is called Plato’s Atlantis. It’s the last fully realized collection that McQueen created before his death in February of 2010. The collection was inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and depicted a time when the icecap would melt and we’d be forced to live under the sea again. So instead of telling the evolution of humankind, it actually talked about the devolution of mankind.

The collection was presented against a large LED screen that featured a film directed by McQueen, in collaboration with the photographer Nick Knight, and showed a woman mutating into a sea creature. The entire collection was streamed live over the Internet, very much as a way of creating a dialogue between the designer and the consumer.

The collection ended with Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” She tweeted beforehand that she was going to actually launch it there, and as a result she got so many hits the whole website collapsed. And I think what’s interesting about this particular collection is I feel as if it brought together so many recurring themes in his work— things like nature and technology—and again, McQueen was very much obsessed by dialectical relationships, particularly the idea of man and machine.

I’m Andrew Bolton, the curator of the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. I think the title “Savage Beauty” very much epitomizes the contrasting opposites in McQueen’s work. As you enter the exhibition, you’re faced with two mannequins—the two mannequins that I think represent many of the themes and ideas that McQueen revisited throughout his career: polarized opposites, whether it’s to do with life or death, lightness or darkness, predator/prey, man/machine.

The first gallery you enter is called “The Romantic Mind,” which is made out of concrete, in a way reflects the rawness of some of the clothes you see in the particular space. It’s inspired by McQueen’s first atelier in Hoxton Square, where McQueen established his house. McQueen trained in tailoring in Savile Row. McQueen was a remarkable craftsman. He was able to channel the skills of his craft, but also to use fashion as a vehicle to express very complex ideas and concepts. And I think in this particular exhibition, and in this gallery in particular, you see how McQueen would master the crafts of his trade and subvert them.

The surface treatment in “Romantic Gothic” is primarily aged mirrors, a material that evokes the idea of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” McQueen often called himself the “Edgar Allen Poe of fashion.” One of the most prevalent and ongoing themes in McQueen’s work was the Gothic, particularly the darker side of the nineteenth century, of Victorianism. Many of the pieces are inspired by the cult of death, and it’s also peopled with characters associated with the literary concept of the Gothic, like vampires, highwaymen, antiheroes, or Byronic heroes.

We have a casket featuring McQueen’s posthumous collection, unofficially called Angels and Demons. And it shows McQueen’s engagement with art history as well as his love of Flemish painters. That was his favorite moment in art history.

The “Cabinet of Curiosities” refers to the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century practice of collecting objects from natural history as a way of viewing the world. This room, in a way, is the heart and soul of the exhibition in terms of the fact that you see the breadth of McQueen’s imagination in the pieces on display and the objects that inspired him (nature, primitivism). All the major themes you’ll confront throughout the exhibition are very much present in this particular gallery. You’ll also see ten iconic moments from his runway shows. McQueen was a great sponge, and he looked everywhere for inspiration, and you see all those references come together in this particular gallery.

In “Romantic Nationalism,” the surface treatment is marquetry that is designed to reflect McQueen tartan. McQueen was an incredible storyteller, and most of his collections are narrative based. In this particular case, it shows his great pride in his Scottish heritage and also his great love of British history. So in a way, there’s a face-off between the Scots and the Brits.

The second room, “Highland Rape,” is comprised of raw wood. Highland Rape was very provocative when it first was shown in 1995; many people interpreted the rape as being the rape of women. McQueen was very adamant in the fact that the rape in the title referred to the rape of Scotland through the Jacobite Risings of the eighteenth century and the Highland Clearances of the nineteenth century. I think that the violence of that particular time in history was reflected in McQueen’s clothes in the very construction of them; it’s almost as if he took scissors to the garments and slashed them.

The hologram was the finale of Widows of Culloden. Near the hologram is a variation of the dress that Kate Moss is wearing, made out of hundreds of layers of silk organza with raw edges.

In “Romantic Exoticism,” we wanted very much to give the idea of a music box. So we used mirrors to give an idea of infinity, and also rotating turntables. McQueen often looked for inspiration not only in the distant past, but also in other cultures, particularly China and Japan. McQueen loved embroidery, and Japan and China were two cultures that excelled, as did India, another great influence in McQueen’s career. VOSS is a collection that featured exoticized garments very heavily. You see two examples here in patchwork that gives the impression of chrysanthemums, very much a flower associated with the East, particularly Japan. VOSS was a collection staged within a box within a box with a two-way mirror. The finale of the collection was a small box within the larger box with the walls crashing down, revealing a naked lady with moths fluttering around her, inspired by a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin entitled Sanitarium.

In “Romantic Primitivism,” the surface treatment is a rusty metal that’s meant to evoke a sunken ship. The featured collection is a collection called Irere, which told the story of a shipwreck at sea and the subsequent landfall in the Amazon. And the video you see suspended above the gallery functioned as a backdrop to McQueen’s collection and was a film shot by John Maybury. Featured very heavily in this particular gallery are contrasting opposites, such as predator/prey, or primitive and civilized.

In “Romantic Naturalism,” the first portion of it is actually a drawing that was created by McQueen that we’ve blown up and reproduced to represent wallpaper. Nature was probably one of the most prominent themes throughout his career. McQueen loved nature—loved the natural world—and often looked to the natural world for the raw materials of his clothes.

The final gallery, “Plato’s Atlantis,” is the last fully realized collection that McQueen designed before he died in February 2010. And it’s covered in acrylic tiles to give the idea of a clinical laboratory. And to me it was a collection that in a way summarized all the major themes throughout McQueen’s career—the contrasting oppositions of man and machine, nature and technology. The actual collection was streamed live over the Internet in a way of trying to create a dialogue between the consumer and the creator. McQueen loved to provoke and loved to provoke you emotionally. I think he did that by tapping into one’s cultural anxieties, or one’s uncertainties, or one’s hopes, or one’s desires.