“It’s been a long journey from East London to this moment,” Stella McCartney said as she welcomed guests to the preview of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to the designs of her late friend Alexander McQueen.

Visitors to the museum’s Costume Institute can follow McQueen’s journey in this retrospective exhibition, featuring about 100 ensembles spanning his career—from his 1992 Central Saint Martins graduation collection, to the infamous "Highland Rape" collection, to the Hieronymus Bosch-printed frocks presented just days after his suicide.

Arranged as a trip through the designer’s various obsessions—the gothic, his Scottish heritage, the exotic, the primitive and the (super)natural world—the
exhibition is a maze-like assemblage of mirrors, holograms and music, as stunningly twisted as the darkest designs on display.

Among the earliest works is a selection from the collection of McQueen’s close friend, the late Isabella Blow, on loan from heiress Daphne Guinness. Other close collaborators, including Philip Treacy, Naomi Campbell, and new label head Sarah Burton, provide the exhibition’s audio commentary, giving an even deeper glimpse into the designer’s singular mind, and his quest, as Burton says, “to find the light in the Dark Ages.”

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty opens May 4 and runs through July 31, 2011.

- Heather Corcoran