Noble Endeavor.(Alexander McQueen)

Byline: MARK HOLGATE Photographed by David Sims.

The giant, magically gnarled tree in the garden of Alexander McQueen's East Essex house provided the roots for his majestic tour de force.

Whenever he can, Alexander McQueen heads out of London to his country home, a seventeenth-century farmhouse. It is situated near Fairlight Cove in East Essex, though the somewhat mystical name of this retreat isn't the only thing tinged with magic. On the grounds there is a massive elm whose canopy extends over most of the acre plot it stands upon. McQueen installed uplights around the base of the tree's 24-foot-circumference trunk, so that when night falls it becomes "very Tim Burton, really spooky. . . . If you look hard enough, you can see faces in the bark and the branches."

Even the least assiduous follower of his career will know that the 39-year-old British designer has spent many years fueled by an imagination that would be the envy of Mary Shelley. His fascination with the Gothic, of both the Gorey and gory varieties, has led to collections inspired by everything from taxidermy experiments to the Salem witch trials. For fall that East Essex tree--re-created and wrapped in tulle for his runway show in Paris--sparked a fairy tale that resulted in Nutcracker tulle ballerina dresses, embroidered velvet maharaja jackets, chiffon saris, drummer-boy frogged vests, and gilded Indian slippers.

The story goes something like this: Once upon a time, there was a beautiful feral creature and former punk who descended from the tree she lived in with a raven, transformed herself into a princess, traveled the world, didn't get the prince, but lived pretty happily ever after anyway. McQueen also wove in elements of a monthlong trip to India, the deposed Russian royal family's love of Faberge, and the work of English couturiers Sir Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell, who dressed Queen Elizabeth II in clothes that never overdid the pomp and always looked appropriate to the circumstance. The past has long been a source of fascination for McQueen. "I am always on the National Geographic and History Channels," he says. "I am a sucker for history. I draw on it all the time." And like so many of his other collections, this one is more than just a rose-tinted--or in his case, a bloodred-tinted--vision of times gone by. Instead, he can see the contemporary relevance in events from long ago. This collection manages to touch on the newly found global might of India and Russia; the importance of multicultural diversity; and the need to preserve the heritage of a ...