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Cate St Hill steps into the wicked world of the famous fashion designer and couturier and finds a show not to be missed, have you go your ticket?

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Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Until 2 August
Review by Cate St Hill

London was one of Alexander McQueen's greatest muses: the fashion designer and couturier, born the son of a taxi driver in the city's East End, would draw inspiration from everything from its history to its club scene to Brick Lane. Having cut his teeth as a tailor's apprentice on Savile Row, McQueen went on to study at Central Saint Martins, and could often be found in the V&A, trawling its archives for inspiration: 'It's [the V&A] the sort of place I'd like to be shut in overnight,' he once said.

It is perhaps fitting then that the V&A has brought McQueen back in the form of Savage Beauty, the sell-out exhibition that saw record attendance at the Met in New York, a little more than a year after his suicide in 2010. Taking up three of the V&A's major galleries, the exhibition is a feast for the eyes and an assault on the senses.

Some 240 outfit ensembles and accessories are ordered thematically in a sequence of 10 rooms that are as bewitching as the items on display and as theatrical as the staging of his fashion shows. Visitors are taken on a sensorial journey deep into the psyche of the troubled designer, traversing from light to darkness, from silence to noise and from soft romanticism to sinister fetishism.

The double-height Cabinet of Curiosities shows some 120 accessories and creations. All images: courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The exhibition begins relatively calmly, lulling you into a false sense of security, with a brightly lit concrete box and a simple grouping of tailors' mannequins on wheels. You get a glimpse of the designer's dark imagination though: his early, 'bumster' trousers - relatively shocking at the time in the early Nineties - ride so low that a 'builder's-bum' is revealed on the wearer. Visitors then enter a sumptuous, gilded room that looks like something straight out of Versailles - and this is where the show really begins.

McQueen's work was driven by a paradoxical fascination with life and death, beauty and the macabre. 'People find my things sometimes aggressive, but I don't see it as aggressive,' he once said. 'I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of my personality.' Here, next to the Gothic-inspired Horn of Plenty collection from A/W 2009, where mannequins wear black S&M masks, are pieces from McQueen's final, unfinished collection. Referencing Byzantine art, religious iconography and Old Master paintings, the collection - posthumously titled Angels and Demons - was shown in an ornate Paris mansion a month after his death. The centrepiece is an exquisitely crafted, high-necked, gold-feather jacket with a burnished metallic skullcap - a phoenix rising from the ashes.

McQueen's final, unfinished collection, titled Angels and Demons (A/W 2010)

The show proceeds to a gloomy cave-like space, built of layer on layer of skulls and bones, which picks up on themes of primitivism in McQueen's work. It's a Jungle Out There (A/W 1997), for example, was inspired by African gazelles and featured several garments fashioned from skin and horn, while Eshu (A/W 2000) was shown to the beating of tribal drums and included a synthetic, horsehair dress, beaded and cinched at the waist with a slim belt.

This leads to a grand, woodpanelled room that explores McQueen's obsession with his Scottish heritage and ancestry, best shown in Widows of Culloden (A/W 2006), based on the final battle of the Jacobite Risings in 1745. Tartan-clad mannequins and rousing music reaches a crescendo with the exhibition's next room - The Cabinet of Curiosities, a double-height gallery filled to the brim with glossy, black display cases showing off more than 120 creations and fetishistic paraphernalia. There are feather headdresses, carved-elm bodices, leather prosthetics and 3D-printed shoes as well as 27 screens showing all of McQueen's shows. You could spend hours gazing up at the glittering creations and still find something new.

One of the calmer exhibition rooms, titled Romantic Naturalism

The most magical section of the exhibition recreates the dramatic finale of the Widows of Culloden catwalk show in 2006. Suspended in a glass pyramid, in a room of its own, a 3D hologram shows Kate Moss slowly writhing around in a billowing gown of white organza to the haunting tones of the theme music to Schindler's List. In fact, for the show itself, McQueen used a century old technique called Pepper's Ghost that involved mirrors and projectors, deceiving even 21st-century viewers into thinking it was a digital reverie.

Next there is a mirrored room with slowly spinning mannequins and eery music - you could almost be in a giant jewellery box. At the end of the room, though, there is a padded chamber with four, richly feathered dresses. It looks almost like any other display case, until the lights dim, a nauseous noise starts, like when a life-support machine flatlines, and an image of a 20-stone nude attached to a breathing tube and wearing a demonic mask is revealed.

A dark, cave-like space shows McQueen's interest in primitivism

This was the ending to the Voss (S/S 2001) show. For that, the glass box shattered completely and real moths fluttered about her, leaving the audience to ponder notions of beauty.

McQueen liked to shock the fashion world - he once said in a BBC documentary that he would rather people be disgusted by his shows than have no reaction at all: 'If you walk away and you forgot everything you saw, then I haven't done my job properly'.

Here in the exhibition, these aren't just garments hanging loosely on a hanger or a mannequin: the drama of his fashion shows is brought vividly to life - even if you don't know his work or you're not into fashion, you're promised a showstopper.

The last room shows McQueen's last fully realised collection, Plato's Atlantis (S/S 2010) - a futuristic vision in which the ice caps have melted and humanity has to live under the sea. It ends with a haunting quote from him: 'There is no way back for me now, I'm going to take you on journeys you've never dreamed were possible.' He certainly did that - I left and remembered to breathe again.