Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen is the designer who made 1990s London fashion feel dangerous and exciting. His shows were dark, theatrical, and sometimes shocking, but underneath the drama was some of the best tailoring of the decade, and I think that combination is what made him so remarkable.

Lee Alexander McQueen was born in 1969 in London, the son of a taxi driver, and grew up in the East End. He left school at sixteen and became an apprentice on Savile Row, London's famous street of men's tailors, learning traditional cutting at Anderson & Sheppard and Gieves & Hawkes. He also worked for a theatrical costumier and for designers in London and Milan. That grounding in precise, traditional tailoring shows in all his later work. He then studied at Central Saint Martins, and in 1992 his graduate collection was bought in its entirety by the influential stylist Isabella Blow, who became his great supporter.

His early collections quickly became famous. The "bumster" trouser, cut so low at the back that it showed the top of the buttocks, appeared in his early shows in 1993 and helped start the move toward low-rise waistbands. His autumn/winter 1995 collection, "Highland Rape," showed models in torn tartan and lace, looking battered and staggering, which provoked accusations of misogyny. McQueen said it was about the historical violence of England against Scotland, his ancestral homeland, and not a celebration of violence against women.

In 1996, at only twenty-seven, he was appointed chief designer of the Paris house Givenchy, succeeding John Galliano, and he stayed there until 2001 while continuing his own label. He won British Designer of the Year four times, the first in 1996. His shows became more and more spectacular, including his spring/summer 1999 show, "No. 13," staged in September 1998, in which a model in a white dress was spray-painted by robots on a turning platform.

McQueen was a central figure in the Cool Britannia moment that made London fashionable again. He died in 2010, but his house continues. For me, his work is a reminder that fashion can deal with dark, difficult themes - history, violence, death, nature - and still be exquisitely made. His tailoring alone would make him important; his imagination made him unforgettable.