To all the beautiful people in Melbourne that forgot to get mineral water for the weekend, we will see you in the morning.

McQueen’s collection was shown on a set that took two days to build, with the unexpected addition of two robotic arms built into a wooden floor. For the show’s finale, the American star model Shalom Harlowwas frozen to the spot. The robots, borrowed from Fiat in Italy, sprayed her with fluorescent paint as though she was a car on a production line.

“The collection was about arts and crafts, and the relationship between man and machine,” McQueen said yesterday, adding, “I’m just a bit mad in the head.”

His role as fashion designer has grown beyond the making of dresses. He is the fashion world’s provocateur. His work as an art director is regularly seen in the pages of the style magazines The Face and Dazed & Confused which the designer recently guest edited with the “Access-able” cover story featuring people with physical disabilities. One of them, Aimee Mullins, modelled in the show helped along the way by a pair of beautifully elegant, hand-crafted haute couture wooden legs.

McQueen’s work is about image-making. “I am an illusionist for the next millennium,” he says. Like Chalayan, he uses fashion as an arm of the visual arts. If he sells a few suits along the way, so much the better