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In the 1990s London Fashion Week became seriously cool. There was one reason for that: Alexander McQueen. The cocky East Ender, one-time pie-and-mash shop employee, was making razor-sharp clothes, epitomising all that was raw and brilliant about London. The late stylist Isabella Blow had plucked McQueen from obscurity in the early 1990s after seeing his student show. By the time he showed his first official collection, ‘Nihilism’, at London Fashion Week in 1993, he was already a star. McQueen was the must-see show for the next decade with fashion editors and celebrities fighting over front-row seats.

Lee Alexander McQueen was born in London in 1969. The son of a cabbie, he left school at 16 and began an apprenticeship at Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard before enrolling on the MA in fashion at Central Saint Martins. His shows captured the anti-establishment tone of the times; McQueen unwittingly epitomised the Cool Britannia era with his slim, angular silhouettes and flesh-revealing cuts. Feature continues

In October 1996, at just 26, McQueen was appointed as head designer for French fashion house Givenchy, the label famous for dressing Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s. He left after just a few seasons, and once told me, ‘It was like having a boyfriend that you know you have to break up with.’ He returned to form when Gucci invested in his label in 2002 and he opened his own shop on Bond Street. The designer had come of age and so had his clothes; his signature tailoring was now accompanied by beautiful craftsmanship and a super-luxe accessory line. By the time he died McQueen had won British Designer of the Year four times and had been awarded a CBE.

Over the years I encountered McQueen in the flesh several times, in 2001 spending an afternoon with him in Clerkenwell around the corner from his studio. We started by drinking cheap house red in a scruffy local pub before ducking into a pie-and-mash shop (for old times’ sake). That day he was in good spirits looking tanned and lithe after a weeks of personal yoga sessions and telling me: ‘I’ve grown up… I’m giving up all the drink and drugs and that stuff.’ Gucci had just invested in his label and he was turning over a new leaf. ‘I believe in fashion again,’ he said. ‘I was losing it a bit in Paris.’

A year previously, I’d spent an afternoon backstage watching him prepare for his spring/summer 2000 show with meticulous precision, oblivious to the Champagne-fuelled party going on around him, barely distracted even when pals Kate Moss and Gwyneth Paltrow rocked up. More recently, he was at the other end of the phone when I interviewed the late Isabella Blow for Time Out in 2005. She had picked McQueen as her favourite Londoner (naturally) and kept phoning him in Mallorca from her Tatler desk to confirm dates of certain shows. Blow seemed depressed that day and McQueen was urging her to go to Spain. ‘He’s telling me to go to Mallorca so I can have a break…’ She seemed genuinely moved.

Apart from changing the silhouette and creating bumster trousers in the late 1990s, the thing that McQueen will be remembered for is his spectacular fashion shows that gave even the most jaded fashion editor goose bumps. His filmic productions, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds and usually starring Moss and every other A-list model on the planet, featured terrifying special effects, whether sheets of rain, clouds of smoke or real moths emerging from fake corpses. McQueen’s shows gave London Fashion Week more buzz than New York, Milan and Paris put together. No designer has done that before or since.

Read Isabella Blow on Alexander McQueen