Isabella Blow arrived at the Royal College of Art degree show in 1992 wearing a Philip Treacy hat shaped like a ship

Isabella Blow arrived at the Royal College of Art degree show in 1992 wearing a Philip Treacy hat shaped like a ship. She left having bought Lee McQueen's entire graduate collection for £5,000, paid in instalments of £100 a week. The clothes — low-slung bumster trousers that exposed the base of the spine, frock coats with exaggerated lapels — were unwearable by most standards. Blow wore them anyway.

She was not his first champion, but she was the most visible. Blow introduced McQueen to photographers, stylists, and the editors who would later fill the front rows at his shows. She modelled for him. She wore the clothes to openings, to dinners, to anywhere that might generate a photograph. When McQueen renamed himself Alexander for the sake of gravitas, it was Blow who insisted the world take notice.

Their relationship was collaborative and combustible. McQueen cut clothes on her body. She styled his early runway shows, often for no payment beyond the garments themselves. By the mid-nineties, when McQueen was appointed head designer at Givenchy, the dynamic had shifted. He had access to ateliers and budgets; she had mounting debts and a growing sense that the industry had moved past her. They remained close, but the partnership was no longer equal. When Blow took her life in 2007, McQueen was among the pallbearers. He followed her three years later.

Blow's influence on McQueen is often framed as discovery, but that undersells her role. She did not simply find him. She positioned him. The bumster, the piece that would become his signature, only mattered because Blow made it visible. Without her, McQueen might still have succeeded — the tailoring was already exceptional, the vision already formed — but the trajectory would have been different. Slower. Less certain.

The model who became the template

Kate Moss walked for Alexander McQueen twice in 1995. The first time, she wore a shredded dress and a metal cage. The second, she appeared in a hologram, her image projected mid-air while the real Moss stood backstage. The hologram became one of the most reproduced images of nineties fashion, a technological flourish that overshadowed the clothes themselves.

Moss did not need McQueen the way Blow did. By 1995, she was already the face of Calvin Klein, already the counterpoint to the supermodels who preceded her. But McQueen needed her. Moss brought legitimacy. She was the model everyone wanted and few could book. Her presence at his shows signalled that McQueen was no longer an outsider.

Their working relationship was pragmatic. Moss did not style his shows or introduce him to editors. She showed up, wore the clothes, and left. But her body — small-framed, boyish, androgynous — suited McQueen's cut in a way the taller, broader models of the era did not. The low-rise trousers, the sharp tailoring, the pieces that required a specific frame to work: Moss could wear them without adjustment.

McQueen used her image repeatedly. The hologram appeared in retrospectives, in exhibitions, in features about his career. It became shorthand for his ambition, his willingness to push past the runway's traditional limits. But the relationship was not sentimental. Moss walked for other designers. McQueen cast other models. They were useful to each other, and that was enough.

The collaborator who stayed

Sarah Burton joined Alexander McQueen in 1996 as an intern. She was 22, fresh from Central Saint Martins, and assigned to the womenswear team. McQueen himself had trained at Anderson & Sheppard and Gieves & Hawkes, learning the structure and discipline of Savile Row tailoring. Burton absorbed that same language, but her training came directly from McQueen's atelier.

She worked on embroidery, on draping, on the technical construction that underpinned McQueen's more theatrical gestures. By 2000, she was head of womenswear. She did not design the collections — that remained McQueen's domain — but she executed them. The difference matters. A designer proposes; a head of atelier makes it possible. Burton was the latter.

When McQueen died in 2010, Burton was the obvious successor. She had spent 14 years translating his sketches into garments, understanding not just what he wanted but how to achieve it. Her first collection as creative director, autumn/winter 2010, was already in development when McQueen died. She finished it. The show opened with a film of moths and closed with a gold feathered gown. It was unmistakably McQueen, but the hand was Burton's.

Her tenure at Alexander McQueen has been defined by continuity. She has not attempted to reinvent the house or distance herself from its founder. The tailoring remains sharp, the embroidery intricate, the silhouettes rooted in the same principles McQueen established in the nineties. Critics have occasionally questioned whether this constitutes creative direction or stewardship. The distinction may not matter. Burton has kept the house operational, commercially successful, and creatively coherent for over a decade. That is not a minor achievement.

The 2011 wedding dress she designed for Catherine Middleton — ivory silk with lace appliqué and a nine-foot train — brought Alexander McQueen into a different kind of visibility. It was seen by an estimated two billion people. It was also, structurally, a demonstration of the atelier's capabilities: the lace was hand-cut, the bodice shaped using eighteenth-century corsetry techniques. Burton did not make the dress herself, but she directed the team that did. That is what a head of atelier does.

What remains

The three women who shaped Alexander McQueen — Blow, Moss, Burton — occupied different roles. Blow was the advocate, the one who made noise. Moss was the image, the one who made the clothes visible beyond the runway. Burton was the technician, the one who made the vision executable.

None of them were muses in the traditional sense. McQueen did not sketch their faces or name collections after them. But they were essential. Blow gave him access. Moss gave him credibility. Burton gave him continuity, even after his death.

The word 'muse' implies passivity, a figure who inspires but does not act. That does not describe any of these women. They worked. They made decisions. They shaped the house as much as McQueen did, even if the credit rarely reflected that.

Burton still runs Alexander McQueen. Moss still appears in campaigns. Blow is gone, but her influence is visible in every young designer who gets backed by an editor with more vision than budget. The house continues, not because McQueen's ghost lingers, but because the structures these women helped build remain intact.