Alexander McQueen may have been a prat but at least he was an interesting one

Alexander McQueen famously claimed to have stitched ‘I am a c***’ into the entoilage of a jacket for Prince Charles. The insult was invisible behind the lining and his tailor master later investigated and found nothing. So what was this? An invention, an embroidery of the truth? It certainly became a good source of publicity as he spread the story — step one in the creation of his bad-boy image.

McQueen wore his counterculturalism loudly on his sleeve. Often tediously. He wanted to be dark, dark, oh so dark. Great. I think it’s pratty, but there are millions of people who don’t, so good for him — good for them. And even if he was a prat, he was still an interesting and unusual prat, idiosyncratic and determined, slashing into fashion clichés and reforming them. And, as the current V&A exhibition should show, McQueen really did have imagination.

That McQueen flourished (creatively, financially) within the industry he attacked was a mark of genius. The skull-print scarves he introduced went from unsettling, to edgy, to cool, to popular, to populist. Imitations now sell on market stalls the world over. The skulls became the polka dots they had originally replaced. It takes vision to achieve this level of William Morris universality.

Even his ‘bumsters’ — his arse crack-revealing innovation — transformed the builder’s bum into Rococo décolleté. It spawned low-waisted trousers and a lot of visible thong-ing and, when thong met bumster, the ‘whale’s tail’.

McQueen’s vision was unique. He was the first to introduce Grand Guignol theatrics into fashion. John Galliano, preceding him chronologically at Givenchy, had comparable flair and showmanship, but his vision was more ethnographic, more all over the place, and less determinedly dark. Vivienne Westwood’s earlier punk had been more genuinely subversive, but, crucially, less haute couture.