McQueen Leaping Lizards

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times The runway at the spring Alexander McQueen show in Paris.

On my way out of the extraordinary Alexander McQueen show tonight at the Bercy sports complex—streamed live onto the Internet by SHOWstudio.com—I stopped in the control room to ask Nick Knight, the director, how he thought things had gone. He said Lady Ga Ga had twittered the show. I gathered the numbers were huge.

I’ll be curious to know the reaction from Web viewers, but from where I sat, I thought the staging—with two cameras mounted on rolling cranes in the middle of the white, bio-lab runway—was impressive. On the screen in the background, the models were seemingly projected into infinity, with the looming cranes part of the image. I thought Mr. McQueen and Mr. Knight enhanced the runway experience for the Web—in other words, they considered what the medium offered visually and then tried to exceed expectations.

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times A dress from the spring Alexander McQueen collection.

Evolution—Darwin, the natural world, technology—provided inspiration for the dazzling clothes. Most of the dresses, in engineered prints and jacquards, were molded and draped, and in astonishing whorls of colors. Platform shoes looked like the hulls of ships.

What is hard to appreciate is the amount of thought and work that went into the making of the clothes. The prints and fabrics were amazing, but then consider a slim gray coat cut clean open at the chest and then closed in a soft arc near the hem, as if the whole thing had been hollowed out of an existing coat and this was the shape that remained. Shown over a print dress, with a matching lining, the coat seemed a different species of garment. It was most definitely a new silhouette.

See the Alexander McQueen collection.