Let us hear it at the outset, for once, not for the artist – and that, be assured, is what Alexander McQueen emphatically was, not to say a genius – but for the person who has worked tirelessly to lay before us the products of his preternatural talent, the expression of its scope and depth.

In the case of the V&A’s blockbuster new exhibition, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, that person is its curator Claire Wilcox, to whom I am granting the honour – if that’s not putting it too pompously – of featuring in the principal picture on this page today. I photographed her at the press launch of the show while she was supplying background information to some of the journalists present.

Later, I accidentally kicked the back of her leg in the scrimmage of the exhibition’s main room, The Cabinet of Curiosities. I extend my apologies now.

The quotation on the wall behind Claire is supplied by the artist. It says: “I want to be the purveyor of a certain kind of silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I am dead and gone people will know that the 21st century was started by Alexander McQueen.”

The museum’s senior curator of fashion, as well as being Professor of Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion, Claire has had charge of many headline exhibitions, including Radical Fashion (2001), Vivienne Westwood (2004) and The Golden Age of Couture (2007). None, however, has had the impact, the pzazz, the massive public appeal of the McQueen show.

When it was first seen, in slightly less lavish form at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in 2011, it became one of the venue’s top 10 events in its history.

The success looks sure to be repeated at the V&A; indeed it is already identified as its most successful fashion show.

There were 700 of us crammed in at the press view, at which time this was exactly a hundredth of the number of people who had booked tickets.

In total, the show includes more than 240 ensembles and accessories, the largest number of pieces designed by McQueen and collaborators ever seen together. They range from McQueen’s Central St Martin’s postgraduate collection of 1992 to his final designs for A/W 2010, which were completed after his shocking suicide.

Martin Roth, the director of the V&A, said: “I am thrilled that this magnificent show has come to London and feel passionately that the V&A is its natural home.

“This is truly a homecoming. Lee Alexander McQueen presented his work here during his lifetime and studied the museum’s wide-ranging public collections of tailoring, painting, art, photography and books as inspiration for his visionary designs. Yet he remained vigorously anti-establishment and a true provocateur.”

The thematic presentation of the show reflects McQueen’s Romantic sensibility, examining ideas and concepts central to his work.

This include his subversive tailoring (notable, as can be seen at close hand, for its technical perfection), his Gothic sensibility, primitivism and the animal world, heritage and ancestry, nature and the natural world, and technology and handcraft.

Moving through the various rooms, with their blackened walls and sudden surprises, one has the impression of being a passenger on some massively jazzed up fairground ride.

In one room, mannikins reside in what appears to be an ossuary lined with layers of dark bones; another places then among splendid gilt and huge mirrors.

Beyond what might be expected, garments are crafted from horn, skin and hair.

The designer’s fascination with his Scottish heritage features prominently.

The heart of the show is the astonishing Cabinet of Curiosities, a double height gallery that soars upwards with more than 120 garments on display in its compartments.

Some were produced in collaboration with the milliner Philip Treacy and jewellers such as Shaun Leane and Sarah Harmarnee. There are 27 screens showing footage from McQueen’s many catwalk presentations.

In the room beyond is encountered the spectral form of model Kate Moss in the spectacular Pepper’s Ghost, which provided a memorable finale to McQueen’s 2006 show The Widows of Culloden.

This makes use of viewing technology pioneered in the 19th century.

As you leave the show, you pass on the wall a final quotation extracted from the sayings of the artist: “There is no way back for me now. I’m going to take you on journeys you’ve never dreamed were possible.”

A fitting epitaph.