References to the early twentieth century and the Edwardian fashions in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) are evident in two McQueen looks from It’s Only a Game (Spring/Summer 2005). The high, fitted collars and vertical pintucks of silk net and lace of dresses from the early 1900s inspired McQueen’s jackets, with the grosgrain ribbon typically found inside historic boned bodices acting here as an exposed waist closure.

This sequin dress––from a collection memorializing Isabella Blow, one of McQueen’s closest confidantes, champions, and muses—is paired here with a hat, previously owned by Blow, that was crafted by their mutual friend and frequent collaborator, Philip Treacy. Deceptively simple, McQueen’s dress design displays his gift for imbuing the technical with the personal: On the wearer’s left side, opaque and translucent gold-colored beads are precisely embedded between vertical rows of black sequins to produce a faithful portrait of Blow.

Here, McQueen skillfully used curved seams and quilting to create a down-filled coat that recalls an iconic work by another master of twentieth-century pattern cutting, Charles James. His 1937 eiderdown and satin jacket, photographed for Harper’s Bazaar in October 1938, is a notable precursor to other high-end “puffer” styles that have been fashionable ever since.

McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2009 collection Natural Dis-tinction, Un-Natural Selection was a pioneering exploration of digital print design that significantly contributed to the widespread (and ongoing) adoption of this technique in the fashion industry. Digitally manipulated images of crystals patterning this pair of dresses exemplify the collection’s themes—and McQueen’s fascination—with the interplay between the natural and the artificial.

This checkerboard suit from Scanners at right flaunts Alexander McQueen’s advanced cutting abilities: Curved or squared, on the grain or bias, the pattern pieces are meticulously arranged to create a vibrant optical illusion, visually sculpting the body. His technique—first honed during Savile Row apprenticeships—can be compared to that of renowned American designer Gilbert Adrian, who similarly excelled in the graphic pattern placement of tailored suits at left.

This jacket from Joan (Fall/Winter 1998-99) reproduces an 1845 daguerreotype by Carl Gustav Oehme, an early adopter of the medium who trained with its inventor, Louis Daguerre. Superimposing Oehme’s image atop a sequined ground textile disrupts the print registration, producing a shadowy effect that further emphasizes the spectral quality of McQueen’s collection, named for martyred saint Joan of Arc.

In a dress from What a Merry Go Round (Fall/Winter 2001-2), McQueen reinterprets the 1920s robe de style silhouette, with its straight cut and volume at the hips, into a sequin-covered dress with rows of tulle and lace. Its green color palette recalls the nightlife of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which is the setting of the film Cabaret (1972), one of the designer’s inspirations for the collection.

Early-nineteenth-century fashions served as a reference in McQueen’s form-fitting light purple dress with empire waistline from Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, as well as two women’s coats for No. 13 that were modeled after period men’s tailcoats. One look, with deconstructed lapels that button to the front collar at left, has a skirt that may be buttoned in back into a tail or buttoned in front to create the skirt of a frock coat—two styles that prevailed throughout the 1800s.