Alexander McQueen (1969–2010), whose retrospective Savage Beauty has now opened at the V&A, was not just a fashion designer but an artist. That’s what the curators want you to take away from this show. More than that, he was an artist in the Romantic tradition: inspired by nature, rebelling against modernity, with his designs he evoked the sublime, that heady mixture of beauty and terror. And above all, they say, he was ruled by emotion.

It would be hard to disagree with these claims. His inspiration and technical artistry were extraordinary, and brought us garments fashioned from razor-clam shells, real flowers, birds’ skulls and leather; sumptuously embroidered silk, golden feathers, tartan, steel.

Yet the work of this taxi driver’s son, who left school at 15 to learn to tailor, was not just driven by feeling; there was a cool rationality in play as well. Said McQueen: ‘I spent a lot of time learning to construct clothes, which is important to do before you deconstruct them.’

And he deconstructed par excellence. Not just traditional silhouettes of clothes (famously he brought us ‘bumsters’, revealingly low-slung trousers). He also challenged traditional ideas of femininity (‘I’m not big on women looking naïve’) and beauty. Some of his over-the-top theatrical shows made political points, such as The Widows of Culloden. Plato’s Atlantis, his swansong, suggested that humankind was on its way back to the swamp, devolving into some kind of aquatic being.

‘I don’t see the point in doing anything if it doesn’t create an emotion,’ he once remarked. And his designs can reduce me – and others – to tears. Why? Because they evoke a childlike sense of wonder – the sort you find in fairy-tales and dreams, which, as grown-ups, we often lose. They gift us with a precious beauty, rare in this broken world.

McQueen was brilliantly, prophetically, tapping into the fears and longings of our times. This show challenges us, as Christians, to think about our relationship to fashion. Is it mere excess and vanity? Or a legitimate expression of God-given passion and creativity? Clothes cover our physical – and psychological – nakedness. They create identity; reshape bodies; assert power. They mediate between our deepest selves and others.

This exhibition both beguiles and disquiets the viewer. ‘I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil,’ McQueen said. Like most of us, perhaps.