Lee Alexander McQueen chose to kill himself, with perhaps unintentional resonance, on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010.

Although the suicide took place in London, where McQueen lived in a Mayfair townhouse, the shocking news quickly reverberated 3,400 miles away, where much of the fashion world was gathering in Bryant Park for the first day of New York Fashion Week.

Word filtered out slowly and erratically. One attendee recalled sitting at the Richard Chai show and getting a text that the 40-year-old designer, known professionally as Alexander McQueen, had died, but no one sitting around him seemed to know whether the news was true. Another recalled seeing a line of BlackBerrys in the front row go off almost in unison. The Vogue editor Anna Wintour was reported seen rushing out of the BCBG show, a stricken look on her face. At Ports 1961, there was a moment of silence before the show began.

Puzzlingly, very little of this kind of detail has made it into “Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin” (Scribner), a new biography by the British author Andrew Wilson.

Mr. Wilson deals with the death of McQueen with disappointing swiftness over the five last pages of the book — the discovery of the body by his two housekeepers, the evidence that he seemed to have hanged himself after a failed attempt to slash his wrists, the stunned (but not altogether surprised) reactions from friends and colleagues — before briefly recapping the somber funeral two weeks later.

One wants him to pause and reflect a bit more on the odd confluence of events and capture more fully how the horror of this death rippled through the many layers of the global fashion community. As a reader, I wanted to know what it must have been like to be inside those Bryant Park tents when the awful news broke.

It’s a curious misstep for a book that, despite its occasional flaws, is a thorough and highly readable accounting of one of the most talented and influential designers of his generation, someone who not only got a major museum retrospective just a year after his death but, in life, seemed to both revel in and recoil from the fame his talent brought him.

The book covers ground familiar to anyone who follows fashion: McQueen’s hardscrabble childhood in the East End of London and the early signs of artistic promise. His struggles with the growing sense that he was gay. The bold move to Milan at age 21, showing up unannounced at the offices of Romeo Gigli in “patchwork flares and a checked shirt” and ultimately walking away with an apprenticeship. His years at the prestigious Central Saint Martins (and his volatile, poisonous relations with that school’s legendary professor, Louise Wilson). The start of his own label, the early acclaim (coupled with occasional critical derision and headlines like “The Designer Who Hates Women”) and the career-making appointment at Givenchy. His symbiotic, complicated relationship with Isabella Blow (herself a suicide) and the drug-induced rages during his final years.

Much of this has been covered in two other recently published books, “Gods and Kings” by Dana Thomas, and “Champagne Supernovas” by Maureen Callahan, not to mention the play “McQueen,” now running in the West End.

But what makes Mr. Wilson’s book different, and ultimately a better read, was the access granted him by family and close friends as McQueen’s authorized biographer.

Those interviews illuminate the strongest part of the book, the lengthy section dealing with McQueen’s early years, particularly the close bond he shared with his mother, Joyce, a beacon of stability in an often-turbulent life. As one longtime friend told the author: “He was this little fat boy from the East End with bad teeth who didn’t have much to offer, but he had this one special thing, this talent, and Joyce believed in him.”

For most of his life, McQueen struggled with his looks (hating his teeth and his fluctuating weight), yet time and time again he is described as being oddly seductive, with a distinctive laugh and an impish charm that won people over. Tom Ford described him as being a “marshmallow” in person: “adorable, charming and kind.”

Not all of the memories are flattering, of course, particularly of the boyfriends he avidly pursued, often treated horribly and then discarded with nary a look backward. (One ended their relationship when McQueen insisted that he have sex with a third man while the designer watched.) Throughout the book there are examples of friendships, business partnerships and romantic entanglements ending with a cold suddenness.

To some close friends, McQueen’s inability to foster and maintain a relationship went back to a childhood trauma he disclosed to a few of them: Being sexually abused by the husband of an older sister. “He was hurt and angry and said that it had robbed him of his innocence,” Detmar Blow, Isabella’s husband, told the author. “I thought it brought a darkness in his soul.”

There was also, of course, darkness in his fashion, particularly in the infamous “Highland Rape” show in March of 1995, which featured women walking down the runway with tartan dresses ripped at the chest to expose their breasts. Most critics were appalled, including one from The Independent, who wrote: “He is a skillful tailor and a great showman, but why should women play abused victims? The show was an insult to women and to his talent.”

And here is where the book begins to stumble a bit. Mr. Wilson is very good at describing the actual shows produced by McQueen, largely by quoting reviews at the time. But as someone who is lacking in fashion expertise (previous books include biographies of Harold Robbins and Sylvia Plath), explaining the particular creative imagination that McQueen was able to tap into eludes him.

There are gaps in the people he chose to interview, mostly notably Anna Wintour, who spoke movingly at the McQueen memorial six months after his death (wearing, according to the author, a “black and gold embroidered coat”), and who is close to two other designers, John Galliano and Marc Jacobs, with their own well-documented substance abuse problems.

She might have had had some interesting things to say about why fashion seems to both attract and punish such fragile creatures. (And one wishes that the insightful New York Times fashion critic Amy Spindler were alive to articulate what she and a few others saw in McQueen’s early and often shambolic runway shows that convinced them that they were witnessing genius at work.)

It is also poignant that Mr. Wilson was not able to interview McQueen’s mother, the person closest to him, who died just days before he killed himself. In fact, friends suggest that Joyce’s own funeral, scheduled for Feb. 12, was the reason he took his life — as if to avoid a day he never wanted to see.

Joyce seemed to understand what her death might do to his fragile psyche. His brother, Tony, who had been at her bedside when she died, recalled getting a phone call from McQueen the next day, asking what their mother had said in her final moments.

“And I said, ‘She said she loves you and you’re not to go kill yourself now.’ And then I didn’t hear from him again.”