Lee Alexander McQueen entered the trade on Savile Row in the mid-1980s. He apprenticed at Anderson and Sheppard and then Gieves & Hawkes, where he learned to cut a two-piece from the inside out.

McQueen moved on to the theatrical costumiers Angels and Bermans before joining Koji Tatsuno, and in Milan he worked under Romeo Gigli. He returned to London for an MA at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 1992 with the collection “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims,” bought in full by Isabella Blow.

He founded Alexander McQueen in London that same year, showing his first collections on the city’s emerging schedule and operating out of a small studio in the East End through the mid-1990s.

His language sits in the tension between Savile Row tailoring and the slashed, bias-cut, bumster-low silhouette. Leather harnessing runs alongside a frock coat cut tight through the chest and flared sharp at the hip.

LVMH appointed McQueen head designer at Givenchy in October 1996, succeeding John Galliano on the haute couture and ready-to-wear lines. The Paris collections that followed turned on white tailoring, feathered evening dresses, and a hard-shouldered jacket cut for the house’s couture clients.

The signal work continued on his own London label. Spring-summer 1999 produced the spray-painted muslin dress and the prosthetic-leg runway of Aimee Mullins. fall-winter 1998 closed with the Joan of Arc finale in red contact lenses.

Against the Helmut Lang minimalism that defined the late 1990s and the romanticism of Galliano at Dior, his shows placed English tailoring inside narrative theater. He was named British Designer of the Year four times between 1996 and 2003.

The Gucci Group acquired 51 percent of Alexander McQueen in December 2000, and he left Givenchy in March 2001 as the partnership rolled out and his runway shows moved to Paris.

Plato’s Atlantis in spring-summer 2010, with the armadillo boot and digital-print sheath, stands as the final runway collection he presented. He died by suicide in London on February 11, 2010, at the age of 40, days before his mother’s funeral.

Sarah Burton, his longtime head of womenswear, succeeded McQueen at the label in May 2010. The house passed to Seán McGirr in October 2023 under Kering. McGirr’s debut for fall-winter 2024 returned to the foundational codes through compressed silhouettes, tailored leather, and high shoulders.

The label’s continuity rests on the tailoring vocabulary McQueen set down between 1992 and 2010. The frock coat, the bumster, and the harness remain the terms any successor at the house works through.