Alexander McQueen - London boy RIP

Seems reasonable to ask why, given the stature of some of the people in the RIP thread, Alexander McQueen deserves a separate one all of his own? Not to doubt the sincerity of the people who have posted at all or to doubt that McQueen had talent, albeit in a milieu of greed, excess and exploitation but he was surely not so significant a figure as to warrant this.

Since when are threads supposed to be awarded on particular merit? I wouldn't have started a separate thread on this, but the OP clearly felt that way, and while I'm sure we all know about threads on the forum that we don't like or that we think are pointless, we'll just have to allow some leeway (NO pun intended!) on this.

I don't know anything about fashion and certainly never paid any attention to Mr McQueen. Neither do I have any idea in what way he was culturally significant and wouldn't be able to tell any of his work from stuff in the charity shops, but I have heroes who aren't so popular as to have achieved the kind of universal recognition that might make a separate thread, or several, inevitable. Unfortunately, celebrities' deaths will of course always attract so much more attention than those of less popular people that it may seem unjust and can be upsetting. I rather like the Guardian's 'Other Lives' column for that reason.

I still think it's a sad story about which more might come out, and besides the expressions of sympathy no doubt a lot of muck-raking, too, which I'm not looking forward to. Besides the evident and slightly trivial, but often forgotten, fact that money and fame don't make people happy, there's always that he doesn't seem to have had anyone left to turn to--I'll never forget the expression on an African friend's face when he was reading the newspaper and could quite genuinely not comprehend that someone young, I forget who it was, had committed suicide. No doubt this situation in his part of Africa will have changed quite considerably in the intervening years, but to him at the time it was just inconceivable that the people around that person couldn't have prevented the suicide. He might have been rather naïve in this, but he was sincerely shocked.