McQueen's Modern Macbeth

Catwalk audiences like to maintain an aura of jaded, seen-it-all-before cool. Show them a cage of naked supermodels, or a coat sculpted from solid gold, and they react with all the enthusiasm of Paris Hilton offered a Saturday job in Tesco.

So when a show in a no-frills sports hall on a freezing night in Paris has international Vogue editors and heads of the world’s most glamorous department stores leaping to their feet in a standing ovation, it is something special.

With this collection, one-time enfant terrible Alexander McQueen consolidates his reputation as one of fashion’s major players, as he prepares to expand with the launch of an additional lower-priced line, McQ.

Weaving strands from previous greatest hits with new ideas, the show opened with curvy suits in a rough, heathery tweed: part Hitchcock heroine (his hit show of 2005), part Highland Rape (his rather more controversial show of 1995). A dress made entirely of pheasant feathers, meticulously engineered so that it rippled against the body like silk, brought to mind a dress of razor clamshells worn by Erin O’Connor; a gown in waves of cream chiffon was scattered with butterfly wings, recalling the show when a model was besieged by giant moths.

Inspired, the designer said, by the Scottish Highlands and Macbeth, this show was by turns macabre and majestic: one model wore an off-the-shoulder gown fit for an Ingres portrait of a vicomtesse, which tumbled from a tiny waist to billowing skirts in rich brocade embroidered with birds and flowers in palest blue.

This being Paris fashion week, Banquo was replaced by Kate Moss, whose ghostly figure, conjured up as a hologram in a glass pyramid, created the suitably haunting finale.