1995 : March: Presents "Highland Rape" collection. McQueen's signature red-and-black tartan, shot through with yellow, appears for the first time. The controversial show puts him on the map and secures his bad-boy reputation. October: "The Hunger" collection marks the first appearance of men's designs-including taffeta suits- and is the first of producer Sam Gainsbury's spectacular shows for McQueen.
Some pieces bore the most exquisite ornamentation, with painstaking jet- and bugle-bead embroidery-an art the designer honed during his tenure in the 1990s at the Parisian couture house Givenchy. It was there that his Brothers Grimm fantasies acquired more romantic overtones. With the artisans of the Givenchy atelier at his disposal, he began to work more elaborately and with greater complexity. "I learned lightness . . . to soften," he once said.