My knowledge of style – the sartorial kind, at least – is rudimentary. I can decipher a dress code, match stripes with a pattern, identify a good pair of brogues, but I’ve learned more about haute couture from Derek McCormack novels than anything else. I’m always happy when fashion photography or criticism filters through to me on Tumblr, but it’s a sphere of life that I feel mild guilt about not understanding better, like opera (with added practicality).

So if I only had vague advance notions of Savage Beauty, an exhibition devoted to the late designer Alexander McQueen that’s choking the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the line stretching down an entire hallway created enough anticipation on its own. The show never explicitly refers to McQueen’s suicide in February 2010, but that event pervades everything inside, like mausoleum air. Indeed, the exhibition’s design resembles a crypt: blank grey walls, huge tarnished mirrors, quietly funereal soundtrack. The dark leather covering the faces of many mannequins suggests both fetishism and death mask. Yet McQueen’s clothes are the opposite of austere. The first outfit I saw was a dress made of shells stripped and varnished to the point of resembling white feathers, or plate armour.

Drastic proportions abound: uniform jackets with massive collars, the balsa wood skirt that sweeps out like a wearable fan, shoulders arcing up and sideways to become great black wings. Even a billowy taffeta dress has severity to it, suddenly cinching inwards at the thigh. Rather than discomfort, the extreme dimensions promise transfiguration. No wonder McQueen named one of his collections after a David Cronenberg film (Scanners). He also designed a silver-spined corset apparently inspired by H. R. Giger, and a leather cap crowned with ostrich feathers and a metal skull – the kind of headgear Kenneth Anger would ritualistically kill for.

Not all of the allusions on display are so unearthly: McQueen’s “ChineseGarden” hat, made by Philip Treacy, is a faintly ludicrous pile of chinoiserie. Still, any missteps like that were curtailed by a sense of impiety, even camp: the 2005 collection “It’s Only a Game” is represented at the Met by ensembles of colourful protective equipment and dainty rompers. Yet he wasn’t always irreverent. Savage Beauty ends with the posthumous “Jellyfish” costume, an astonishing tower of iridescence. Next to me, a pair of teenage girls discussed which pop star might be worthy of wearing it.