The late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. (Daniele La Monac/Reuters)

My boyfriend and I were at Century 21 — a clearance-sale store for designer labels in Manhattan — when we discovered an Alexander McQueen in the unkempt racks. It was an oversized grey sweater, with decals of clouds and animals and a big, tacky "McQ" sewn on the front.

The label 'enfant terrible' and its synonyms dogged McQueen all his life, to the point where his actual achievements have been cast in their shadow.

It was from the designer's streetwear-focused ready-to-wear label. To me, it was vintage McQueen: a basic, ubiquitous item of clothing, but at the same time, utterly unique, made off-kilter by the fact that, in extra-small, it hung down to the knees. It was constructed immaculately and fit my boyfriend like no other item of clothing he possesses. It was the decals that sold me, the way McQueen tarted up otherwise bland sportswear with cheeky decorations that courted bad taste in an almost confrontational way. It was an almost perfect microcosm of McQueen's oeuvre, and needless to say, my boyfriend bought it (and for a song).

The label "enfant terrible" and its synonyms have dogged McQueen all his life, to the point where his actual achievements have been cast in their shadow. But he had a hard-won genius in a field where the word is perhaps applied too liberally, where affectation and frippery too easily obscure work of significance and import. McQueen was significant. To understand why this is, one has to understand where he came from.

McQueen, left, had a sense of cheekiness as well as outrageousness. (Benoit Tessier/Reuters)

He was born to a working-class family in east end London. His father was a taxi driver, his mother a schoolteacher, and he was the youngest of six children — not an atmosphere conducive to incubating a fashion talent. At 16, when most boys aren't giving much thought to their futures, he began an apprenticeship with a bespoke tailor on London's Savile Row.

A brief but necessary digression: bespoke is a lot like haute couture in that they are both terms that get bandied about a great deal but mean very specific things and embody very stringent (and rapidly fading) traditions. Bespoke tailoring is a process of handcrafting clothes (typically menswear) tailored to the whims and measurements of an individual client. It is a demanding, artisanal enterprise and a profoundly artistic one. A bespoke suit is, in essence, a sculpture. It is hand-stitched, down to the buttonholes, a one-of-a-kind object that uses fabric, lining and padding to sculpt a human body into its ideal form and fit. To be a bespoke tailor involves five years of apprenticeship. It's a course of study that has no contemporary equivalent in terms of precision and exacting detail. For the 16-year-old McQueen to enter into it was unheard of — he might as well have decided to become a monk.

Following his apprenticeship, McQueen worked with different tailors on Savile Row before getting a job with Romeo Gigli in Milan. He applied to Central St Martin's School of Art and Design to be a pattern-cutting instructor. Based on the strength of McQueen's portfolio, the head of the master's program in fashion design asked him to enroll as a student. He did and climbed ever higher.

The influential stylist Isabella Blow bought his entire graduating collection, paying it off one piece at a time, and generally acted as his muse, and best friend, throughout his career. McQueen launched his own line and eventually was asked to take over as head designer for Givenchy, where he stayed until 2001. In 1996, he became the youngest person to win the British Designer of the Year award, which he would win three more times. In 2003, he was made Commander of the British Empire by the Queen.

What McQueen brought to Givenchy — and to his work in general — was flair. His couture shows were wild, theatrical, over-the-top affairs, melding fashion, robotics, social commentary and a wicked iconoclasm. One of his most famous shows was his Spring/Summer 1999 collection, in which supermodel Shalom Harlow flounced onstage wearing a layered white gown that was cinched above the bust by a leather belt and exploded out from there. She stood on a rotating platform as two robotic armatures whirred threateningly around her and then sprayed the immaculate white dress with jets of black and yellow car paint. When it was all over, she teetered off, dizzy and drenched. In this same collection, Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins – a double amputee — walked the runway in a pair of wooden legs specifically crafted for her. His 2001 Insane Asylum collection, replete with head-bandage hats and straitjacket dresses, ended with a portly nude woman wearing nothing but a gas mask.

A model shows off part of McQueen's 2001 Insane Asylum collection. (Hugo Philpott/AFP/Getty Images)

Unlike ready-to-wear collections, where what's going down the runway represents what will generally be available in stores — and must therefore be wearable — haute couture shows cannot be indicative of general availability. Haute couture dresses must be unique, handcrafted items. So in that sense, those shows are meant to be vast spectacles, which give the customer a sense of where the designer's head is at a particular moment. They are analogous to a studio visit with an artist: one wants to see what ideas they're cooking up and where they're going to take them. McQueen had an innate sense of this potential and pushed his shows into the realm of performance art more than any other couture designer.

McQueen's flamboyance was backed by a highly trained knowledge of the craft, science and art of tailoring. At the beginning of his career, he was the great white hope of bespoke traditions: a young man with the hard-earned skills and the ambition and energy of youth to take the craft into a new century. He made good on this promise, even if he infuriated everyone along the way.

Of his working habits, it was said that he would disappear for months at a time before a show, only to arrive at his offices at the last minute with a bundle of sketches and mad instructions for his atelier. But behind each of those sketches and barked orders was an intimate knowledge of clothing design informed by unparalleled firsthand experience of how clothes fit the body, how best to flatter his client's physiques and how best to use fabric to his sculptural ends.

In the end, McQueen was a sculptor, in a very real sense. We're accustomed to dismissing the words of fashion editors as inflated, pretentious bumph, and now that McQueen is gone, the hosannas are coming fast and furious. But make no mistake: when they call him an artist, they are bang on.

Sholem Krishtalka is a writer based in Toronto.