"Reading the reports of Alexander McQueen’s death you would think we had lost an Oscar Wilde or a Jimi Hendrix. “He was a genius,” says Katharine Hamnett. “What a terrible tragic waste.” “His brilliant imagination knew no bounds,” says Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman.

I’m always skeptical when the word “genius” is bandied about by the fashionista — more or less everything is “genius” in their world, as in, “Love that belt, darling. It’s genius.” I oversaw an Alexander McQueen fashion shoot for Vanity Fair’s Cool Britannia issue in 1996 (styled by Isabella Blow) and the thing that really stood out was the cult of personality he had managed to create around himself. He wasn’t a conventional Alpha male, but he was one of those people who used his shyness as a weapon — a form of passive aggression. When he finally appeared on set, at least two hours late, he was surrounded by flunkies and skulked around at the edges, radiating hostility. The impression he gave was that participating in a photo shoot for Vanity Fair — a privilege that would vastly inflate the amount of money he could extract from credulous advertising agencies — was a colossal chore, far beneath his dignity. He was a rock star. Everyone else was a groupie."

- Toby Young on Alexander McQueen