Lee Alexander McQueen grew up in a terraced house in East London, the youngest of six, sewing dresses for his sisters and sketching in the margins of notebooks that had nothing to do with fashion. He left school at sixteen with one qualification — in art — and talked his way into Savile Row. What he built from there became eighteen years of work that moved fashion further than almost anyone of his generation. But the shows, the spectacle, the technical ferocity — all of it was built on top of a person who never stopped feeling like the boy from Stratford who didn't quite fit anywhere.

His relationship with his mother Joyce was the quiet center of everything. She was the one who passed him his curiosity, his love of Scottish history, and the genealogical research threads that ran through his most personal collections. Isabella Blow, the eccentric aristocrat who bought his entire graduate collection and gave him his professional name, became his champion and his entry point into a world he had no other route into. The Gucci deal that made him wealthy left her with nothing. She died in 2007. Joyce McQueen died on February 2, 2010. Nine days later, he was gone.

This episode is about the gap that never closed — between the working-class boy who was certain the whole thing could end at any moment, and the stage he built for himself anyway. It is about loyalty and guilt, about beauty and the grotesque, and about what it costs to pour everything you are into the work and keep nothing back for yourself.

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