Forget about Inventing Impressionism currently on at the National Gallery.

Set aside the Roy Lichtenstein show that opens in Edinburgh at the Gallery of Modern Art this weekend. The must-see British exhibition this spring is the V&A's Savage Beauty, a hugely ambitious survey of the work of the late, great fashion designer Alexander McQueen. A record-breaking 30,000 tickets have already been purchased before it opens this weekend and the first five weekends are believed to be sold out.

That should come as no surprise. When an earlier version of the exhibition was mounted at the Met in New York people queued for four hours to get in, the lines snaking out of the museum and into Central Park.

McQueen was an unruly, controversial, quixotic talent. A "cockney geezer", as the Linlithgow model Lauren Tempany told the Herald Magazine at the weekend. A raft of recent biographies of the designer have inevitably headlined on stories of sex, drugs and the tragic details of his suicide in 2010. But the exhibition is a celebration of his wild talent rather than his wild days and nights.

Some might feel it's too soon to be lauding someone who burst onto the scene less than 20 years ago but we don't, as a rule, feel the need to wait for posterity's judgement these days. It's a reflection perhaps of the speeded up social media-inflected world we live in.

But it might also be a marker of how we view creativity in the 21st century. McQueen is a very modern kind of model creative. His work was distinctive and outspoken - this was a man who, after all, gave his catwalk shows titles like Highland Rape; a comment on the clearances, born out of his father's Scottish origins and his anti-authoritarian desire to thumb his nose at the establishment - but it was also very foregrounded in collaboration. He worked with models, fashion photographers, magazine editors and musicians to get his work noticed. (Serendipitously, the work of Icelandic singer Bjork, who McQueen worked with extensively, is currently being celebrated in an exhibition at Moma in New York. As yet I'm not aware of any two-for-one ticket offers).

There's a charge to the mix of glamour and controversy and immediacy of McQueen's work that speaks to the times we live in. In that sense you could argue we get the art - and craft - we desire. McQueen arrived at the same moment as the likes of artist Damien Hirst and playwright Sarah Kane (another talent who took her own life). The shock of the new - and its attendant love of shock value - was very much part of the package. It may also reflect what we have lost. It will be interesting to see if McQueen's work now looks different in a post-austerity world. Because inevitably Savage Beauty is a kind of time capsule, a Tardis to take us back to the messy, filthy-gorgeous nature of creativity as the 20th century spilled into the 21st.

And if you can't get tickets to the V&A? Well, who knows? Maybe the exhibition might turn up in Dundee when the V&A's Scottish extension is finally built. Admittedly that does mean we'll have to wait a while.