White-faced models with clown-like mouths revolve around a heap of blackened discarded objects, the music assaults the excited audience and cameras flash. Yet it’s the clothes more than the spectacle that steal Alexander McQueen’s autumn/winter 2009 show, The Horn of Plenty: Everything But the Kitchen Sink.

Tailored with form-distorting, origami-like folds, it’s almost as if the fabrics have been beguiled to do the designer’s bidding regardless of their properties. “Exceptional,” wrote a watching New York Times fashion critic. “A slap in the face to his industry.”

Watched today, Horn of Plenty is a bravura performance from a designer at the height of his power to both shock and delight. It was also, reportedly, a studied farewell to McQueen’s youth as the designer prepared to turn 40. In it, he returned to familiar motifs; past ideas and props literally piled up on the catwalk. The fact it would turn out to be McQueen’s final autumn/winter show before he committed suicide in February 2010 cemented its legacy in fashion history.

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Savage Beauty, a sell-out exhibition in New York and London, followed McQueen’s death and further burnished his reputation, ensuring the designer’s place in the pantheon of the British Romantic tradition. But what of the man?

A photography exhibition by Nick Waplington, who spent six months documenting McQueen as he magicked Horn of Plenty from sketches on the page on to the catwalk, provides a fascinating insight into how he worked. First shown at Tate Britain in 2012, an excerpt of 34 photographs of the 120 seen in London are now on show at the East Wing gallery in Dubai.

In Nick Waplington/Alexander McQueen: Working Process, McQueen appears both wrung out by the demands of his own creativity, and as a smiling figure, surrounded by a close-knit team in his London and Paris studios. The timing of the project, given the tragedy that followed, is remarkable.

“[McQueen] was very worried about his legacy,” the photographer explains in a short film on Working Process that is being shown at East Wing. “The fact that he was able to share his working practice which was very secretive, but he wanted to share that, and he entrusted me with the job of making the pictures.”

If you’re a follower of fashion and you miss McQueen, don’t miss it.

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