After the triumphs of his recent collections, this was a risky show, entirely uncommercial and intentionally provocative, and it generated extreme reactions. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, was visibly ecstatic watching the show; but another magazine editor, afterward, compared the trash-bin styling to “a collection inspired by Wall-E.” And some questioned whether Mr. McQueen, by including such obvious references to trash, was targeting John Galliano’s version of Dior, which, in January 2000, included a couture collection inspired by hobos and that led to protesters wearing plastic garbage bags outside the Dior ateliers on Avenue Montaigne.

Throughout his career, Mr. McQueen has relished pushing people’s buttons, though maybe less obviously since moving his shows from London, where he had developed the reputation as the enfant terrible, to Paris in 2001 after he sold his company to the Gucci Group. Mr. McQueen turns 40 next week, so he is no longer an enfant, though his work remains challenging and confrontational, especially this season, when it seems like the right moment for a deeper exploration.

While he is mocking the establishment for running circles over fashion history, isn’t Mr. McQueen as guilty as the rest?

From 1997 to 2001, he was the designer for Givenchy, one of the luxury brands owned by LVMH, and his tenure there was frequently marked by conflicts with management and mostly negative critical reviews. Before he showed his first collection, succeeding Mr. Galliano, who had moved to Dior, Mr. McQueen offended many French journalists by declaring that the original work of Hubert de Givenchy was “irrelevant.” Amy M. Spindler, the New York Times fashion critic, wrote of Mr. McQueen’s couture debut in 1997: “This was basically a pretty hostile collection from a gifted designer who seems in conflict about his role in the Givenchy studio. How members of the audience responded to the show depended on whether they were fascinated by that hostility and vulgarity or repelled by it.” The same could be said today.

Image PUSHING BUTTONS A duck feather jacket and a hat that sprouts coral. Credit... Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

During his early days in London, Mr. McQueen’s collections were sometimes described as misogynistic. The shows made audiences uncomfortable, and equally fascinated, most controversially in 1995 when he referenced the ravaging of Scotland by England by showing brutalized women in a collection called “Highland Rape.” He later transformed models into animals with horns on their shoulders or wearing leather masks like falcons; and in a 2000 collection, he showed models in a setting that looked like a mental hospital. The historian Caroline Evans, in “Fashion at the Edge,” noted that McQueen’s aesthetic of cruelty was actually culled from historic sources, “the work of 16th- and 17th-century anatomists, in particular that of Andreas Vesalius, the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin from the 1980s and ’90s, and the films of Pasolini, Kubrick, Buñuel and Hitchcock.”