Though he apprenticed on Savile Row, Mr. McQueen, thumbed his nose at the conventions of English style by staging lavish runway productions that included clothes made with animal bones and models made to look as if they were patients in a mental ward or participants in a life-sized chess match. Yet he was a tailor of the highest order, making impeccably shaped suits that were also surprisingly commercial.
Mr. McQueen’s troubled personal life was often the subject of concern among his colleagues and close friends. He was deeply affected when Isabella Blow, the eccentric stylist who discovered and championed him, committed suicide in 2007, and he was said to be devastated by the death of his mother on Feb. 2.
As news of Mr. McQueen's death rippled through the tents of Bryant Park, where the fashion world was gathered Thursday on the first day of the New York collections, there was shock at the loss of a designer of outsize talents, perhaps even genius.
"McQueen was probably the best woman's tailor in the world,'' said Steven Cox, one of two designers of the Duckie Brown label. He was also, "a working-class bloke,'' Mr. Cox said, and one whose renegade instinct manifested itself early on, when he stitched an antiroyalist imprecation into a suit sewn for the Prince of Wales.
"Show after show after show, he amazed us all,'' Mr. Cox said. "You think about him and you think, I am not worthy."
For the hairdresser Eugene Souleiman, who had worked with Mr. McQueen from the earliest days of his career, he was a designer driven by instinct, emotionally fickle and so single-minded in pursuit of his vision that he routinely conducted five preliminary fittings for every fashion show, where most designers settle for one.
"You'd get together with Lee for the first fitting and you'd discuss everything and settle everything, his ideas for the collection,'' said Mr. Souleiman, referring to the designer by his nickname. "You'd go up for the next fitting and find the whole collection had changed.''
Mr. McQueen was the youngest of six children and the son of a London taxi driver, who survives him. He left school at 16 to apprentice at Anderson & Sheppard and then Gieves & Hawkes, two of the most revered English tailors. He worked briefly in Italy before returning to London to pursue a master’s degree from the Central St. Martins design college, where Ms. Blow discovered his work and bought his entire thesis collection. His first shows in London, in dark underground places, were received as a break from the traditional luxury collections being shown elsewhere in Europe.
For five years, until 2001, he also was the designer of the couture label Givenchy, where he turned the classic French house on its head, often drawing the ire of longtime fans of a label known for its elegant black dresses. He offended several French journalists by calling Hubert de Givenchy’s past work “irrelevant.” That year, he sold his own label to the Gucci Group — a rival of Givenchy’s parent company, LVMH — following several conflicts with his label’s management.
During Mr. McQueen’s early days in London, his collections often made audiences uncomfortable, as when he referenced the ravaging of Scotland by England by showing brutalized women in a collection called “Highland Rape.” But since he began showing his collections in Paris in 2001, he became more widely respected for designs that were seen as commentary on the often surreal, and self-referential, world of fashion.
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