A few years back, the late Isabella Blow turned up at my office - in the middle of the afternoon, please note - in what has got to be one of the most exquisite pieces of clothing I have ever laid my eyes on. It was an Empire line evening dress, a millefeuille made up of layers upon layers of fine gauze, gathered at the knee, and then trailing onto the floor, forcing her to hold up the soiled hemline in her hand, just like one of Les Merveilleuses would have done in post-revolution Paris.

"How fantastic that dress is," I remarked, as I delivered the obligatory air-kiss, trying not to choke on the fumes of Robert Piguet's Fracas emanating out of her. "Who's it by?" She stopped and looked at me as if I'd asked the most stupid question she had ever heard, looked down at the ample bosom that was literally falling out of the low-cut, minutely gathered neckline, and then looked back at me and said: "McQueen, of course."

McQueen, of course! How could it be anything else than the work of the designer whose first collection she was famed to have bought and taken back home in garbage bags?

The man who went on to become one of the brightest lights in international fashion before his untimely passing on Thursday.

The first thing that came to my mind when I received the shocking news was that, at least, now Issie would have someone to dress her, and ever since, I've been picturing the two happily reunited in Fashion Heaven, together again, plotting new collections that will, no doubt, change the way the souls up there dress forever, just as he did in this world.

It was very clear, right from the very beginning, that Alexander "Lee" McQueen was going to be one of those designers who would have a big impact on the course of fashion. This was not just the work of a flash-in-the-pan designer, capturing the mood of the moment and then disappearing never to be mentioned again.

Oh no! Only a revolutionary genius could come up with what he did then - trousers cut so low as to reveal the bum crack (not an easy task), jackets tailored to fit the body in a way we'd never seen before, materials handled with a knowledge that others with far more experience could only dream of handling...

And it went on. Season after season he presented his spectacularly beautiful in an even more spectacular - often controversial - manner.

Even the most jaded of the fashion lot would walk out of a McQueen show stunned by what he or she had just witnessed. Because, you see, with McQueen, it wasn't only about the clothes. It was also about his vision, which meant that they had to be presented in the right setting. There was no such thing as a simple McQueen fashion show.

His rise to fame is - to use a cliché - the stuff fashion legend is made of.

The son of an East End cab driver, he was inspired to work in fashion by a documentary on British tailoring on television.

He was then as far off from the stereotype of a fashion designer as you can get - "a yob", as the tabloid press liked to refer to him, who, at his first apprenticeship at bespoke tailors Anderson & Sheppard wrote obscenities in the lining of the Prince of Wales jackets.

Following stints at Koji Tatsuno and later Romeo Gigli, he applied for a job teaching pattern-cutting at Central St Martin's but was instead offered a place on the MA course. Even then, his tutors knew that what they had in hand was no ordinary student.

The timing couldn't have been more perfect. As Britain emerged from years of Thatcherism to regain its place as the epicentre of cool, he became a poster boy of that generation. His spirit lay in the underground but his clothes were being worn by the rich and the famous.

It looked like his genius - and here I use the word in its truest sense - knew no end and he took over from John Galliano as the Golden Boy of British fashion. His ability to combine a dark, surreal vision with a lightness and technical ability of someone far beyond his years landed him the position vacated at Givenchy by Galliano's move to Dior, a job which, ironically, was to provide the only glitch in an otherwise impeccable career trajectory.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will no doubt be subjected to speculation and sordid details surrounding McQueen's death. He was, as many who deserve the title "genius" often are, a tortured soul.

Hopefully, none of the muck thrown up will tarnish and detract from the fact that he was truly one of the most important players in the fashion game who would have surely gone on to create even greater things and who is certainly guaranteed a position in the pantheon of great designers who have turned the mere making of clothes into what is today considered to be an art form.