Invited by La Beauté en Avignon (Avignon Festival of Beauty) in 2000 to create an installation, Alexander McQueen and Nick Knight took a quintessentially perverse approach to the subject of beauty. Comprising 80 gallons of alive, dyed maggots forming the image of an angel taken by Knight, the Angel installation darkens over time and eventually disintegrates into a swarm of flies. The resulting project is a meditation on beauty, time, metamorphosis, and finally death.

"Get the ugliest thing on the planet, the maggot, and transform it into a Madonna."