Alexander McQueen autumn/winter 2010/11Paris Fashion Week

By Hilary Alexander, Fashion Director at Paris Fashion Week 700AM GMT 10 March 2010

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The pick up that British engineer Lee Alexander McQueen was operative on when he committed self-murder in London roughly a month ago was, utterly simply, an unprepared harmony to hold up and death.

A preference of sixteen pieces was shown in Paris yesterday the really day the catwalk show would have taken place in a array of in isolation presentations. The eventuality had the feeling of a requiem.

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The designs were heavily religious, desirous by Byzantine art; by the master woodcarver, Grinling Gibbons, whose work adorns St Pauls Cathedral, Hampton Court Palace and Blenheim Palace; and by Botticelli, Jean Hey and Hieronymus Bosch.

The presentations, that would have been done in McQueens prime venue, the prosperous La Conciergerie, had he lived, were instead staged in the Hôtel de Clermont-Tonnerre. This 18th-century road house particulièr is the family domicile of PPR SA, the oppulance French firm which, by the tenure of the Gucci Group, has a 51 per cent interest in the Alexander McQueen label.

Seven models processed in gentle conform by a gilded, mirrored, first-floor salon, on foot solemnly to the same baroque, operatic functions the late engineer was listening to as he worked on the pick up at his college of music in London, prior to his remarkable and astonishing death, at the age of 40.

The designs were vivid, thespian and evocative, the underlying eremite thesis echoed again and again in sumptuous, gold, ecclesiastical embroideries; in silk jacquard woven with patterns of angels and angels wings; in the hand-painted bullion feathers perceivable underneath the draped dress of a one-shouldered, short gown; and in the stained glass, church- window trinket that filled the necklines of neatly cut peplum-jackets and dresses, and ornate the wrists.

The staid music, sung by the German coloratura soprano, Simone Kermes, and together with Didos Lament from Purcells Dido and Aeneas, strong the gravity of the occasion.

The dark, ungodly side of McQueens prophesy and his love of duds were strong in a spectral, black, floor-length cloak, encrusted with gilded tigers and heraldic embroidery; and in a long, cardinal-like garment with flush mainstay dress beneath, alive with with thousands of rustling bullion sequins as the indication walked opposite the parquet floor.

The lighter, regretful side of the designers inlet shone through, too, in a smoke-grey and china silk jacquard "angel" robe with gold-feathered "wings" on the shoulder, a long, separate dress divulgence a clouded cover of silk chiffon; and in a regal, full-sleeved robe in thickk cream duchesse fine fine cloth and silk chiffon, worked with bullion thread. The indication looked similar to a Gothic queen. The models heads were wrapped in fine cloth embellished with strokes of grey and bullion paint, others with bullion or china feathered mohawks .

On their feet, they wore black or bullion ankle-boots with bullion rope soles and heels, or loosely buckled, thigh-high boots in black leather.

As the last indication appeared in a high-collared, prolonged coupler domestic from bullion feathers and ragged over a white tulle dress sparse with bullion embroidery, an help whispered "There is no more."

She was right. The display was an fatiguing proof of the heated ability and dexterity of McQueen, but all the some-more comfortless for being such a short and touching sign of what the conform universe has lost.

It would have been a fantastic catwalk show, in the good convention of Lee Alexander McQueen. M François Henri-Pinault, the authority and arch senior manager of PPR SA, who was approaching to attend the last display yesterday afternoon, has affianced to keep the Alexander McQueen label.

"This would be the most appropriate reverence that we could suggest to him," he pronounced at a assembly in Paris to benefaction association formula last month.

For the moment, the pattern destiny of the tag rests with the college of music team, led by Sarah Burton, who worked to one side McQueen for sixteen years.

"That will go on for the foreseeable future," a orator said.

A commemorative is programmed for the designer, deliberate the conform might of his generation, but there has been no date set.