The savagery of Alexander McQueen

Adam Curtis’s latest series for the BBC , Shifty , is a hallucinatory study of Britain 's backwaters over the last 40 years .

In one scene, Curtis invokes McQueen 's iconic 2001 Spring/Summer show Voss’, calling it a dramatisation of the “modern illusion of freedom that [McQueen] had helped to create’. “My work is autobiographical,” he said in 2003 .

The designer's last collection, unveiled a few months before his death by suicide in February 2010 often read as apocalyptic, ends in rebirth.

The theatricality of McQueen ’s shows was steeped in cinema.

For McQueen , this was not just fiction, it was life itself.

For all the strength and power stitched into his brocade, he left space for vulnerability.

Adam Curtis frames McQueen as a man who understood the sickness in Britain ’s soul.

He certainly understood how beauty could become confinement; how spectacle could be an effective camouflage for pain.

“It wasn’t really about fashion with Lee ,” said Sarah Burton , who joined the Alexander McQueen label as an intern in 1996 .