The Alexander McQueen Archive Collection

Mira knew McQueen as Lee. Their relationship developed in Hoxton during the 1990s, when his studio and her home occupied the same building and the boundaries between friendship, work and daily life were unusually close. For nearly two years, McQueen lived with Mira in her Hoxton Square loft.

She cut his hair, worked on menswear presentations and contributed to campaigns and grooming. Around them was a wider circle that included figures such as Isabella Blow, Sarah Burton, Shaun Leane and Katy England. The clothes were encountered within this living network, before their place in fashion history had been settled.

Garments arrived as gifts, exchanges for work, studio pieces and objects made specifically for Mira. Invitations were kept because she attended. Photographs were preserved because she took them or knew the people within them. Working materials remained because they belonged to the rooms in which the work was taking shape.

This manner of formation gives the archive its particular significance. Each object retains a relationship to use, circumstance and memory. The result is not a survey built from later acquisition, but a body of material whose provenance is inseparable from a life lived near the work.

McQueen was appointed head designer at Givenchy in 1996, succeeding John Galliano, and remained with the house until 2001. These years coincided with the rapid development of his own label. The two practices should not be read as separate histories.

His Savile Row training had already established a command of cut and tailoring. The Givenchy atelier extended that knowledge through couture draping, dressmaking and the pursuit of lightness. Material from this period records an important exchange between institutional technique and an increasingly distinct personal vocabulary.

Within a collection spanning both houses, changes in finish, proportion and construction can be studied across individual objects rather than inferred only from runway imagery. Studio samples and production variations are especially valuable: they show how an idea was translated, adjusted or resolved.

This is one reason an archive has a different function from a group of celebrated garments. It makes comparison possible. It reveals development, repetition and revision - the working structures through which a designer's language becomes legible.

Museum collections have been central to the study of McQueen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2011 Savage Beauty exhibition brought together approximately one hundred ensembles and seventy accessories from the Alexander McQueen Archive, the Givenchy Archive and private collections. Its scale made clear that McQueen's work belonged within cultural history, not only fashion chronology.

Private archives can preserve a different kind of evidence. They may retain the informal gift, the working photograph, the invitation, the unfinished sample or the object whose meaning depends upon personal context. When catalogued responsibly, these materials can widen the record without converting memory into certainty.

The importance of this archive lies in the relationship between its parts. A runway garment establishes one kind of history. A prototype, handwritten note, photograph or studio remnant may establish another. Considered together, they return creative work to the conditions in which it was made.

Cataloguing does not close that history. It gives it a structure through which new research can proceed. More than 600 objects are being documented as individual works and as parts of a connected record: one that preserves McQueen's technical development, the collaborative world around him and the intimacy through which these objects survived.