McQueen’s talent lay, among other things, in his ability to combine the light and the dark in order to produce clothes whose beauty overwhelmed the viewer. Whether he was troubled and conflicted himself now seems beside the point – it is his work that is left for those of us who did not know him personally. At least that is the opinion of Harold Koda, the head of the Costume Institute, who told me, “I don’t know whether McQueen was such a conflicted person. I think he loved the idea of dichotomies and their manifestations, but his resolution was always to make something beautiful. If you just judge from the clothes themselves, they are about tension between oppositional forces, and it’s quite tempting to say that he was a conflicted person, especially in light of his suicide. But if you just look at the work, the beauty of it is about the synthetic transformation of things that seem like they wouldn’t go together, and by combining them to create something beautiful.”
     McQueen defied clichés. His work was gothic without being goth, romantic without romanticizing, and challenging without being shocking. Like Tim Burton, who inspired one of his collections, McQueen was attracted to the macabre, but not for the sake of shock value, which would be too easy for a man of his talent. “What he seems to do so beautifully,” said Koda, “is to take things that were alarming, repulsive, scary and through the filter of his imagination to make them into something that could be appreciated for its beauty.”