The 40 year-old’s body was discovered at his flat in Green Street, near Hyde Park, London, on Thursday morning.

His apparent suicide comes little over a week after the death of his mother, Joyce, to whom he was very close, and a week before the start of London Fashion Week .

He was also due to unveil his spring collection at Paris Fashion Week in early March.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said McQueen’s death was “non-suspicious”.

Fellow designers rushed to pay tribute to him. Katharine Hamnett said: “He was a genius. What a terrible, tragic waste.’’

A spokesman for Kate Moss, the model, who was a bridesmaid when McQueen “married” his lover George Forsyth in 2000, said she was “shocked and devastated”.

In the days before his death, McQueen posted several messages on his Twitter site , hinting at an apparently erratic state of mind.

On Feb 3, he posted a message saying: “I’m letting my followers know the [sic] my mother passed away yesterday … RIP Mum xxxxxxxxxxxx.” Minutes later he wrote: “Life must go on.”

Last Sunday, he left a message saying that he had had a “------- awful” week “but now my friends have been great but some how I have to pull myself together”.

He was also said to have been deeply affected by the 2007 suicide of his friend Isabella Blow , the stylist.

After McQueen graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in the mid-1990s, Blow had bought his entire collection, a move which many believe launched his career.

Lee Alexander McQueen was not born into a fashion family. Rather, he was the youngest of six children of an East End taxi driver. After leaving school at 16, he worked on Savile Row and his early clients included the Prince of Wales.

His profile was elevated in the early 1990s when his own line of low “bumster” trousers was launched in London.

Between 1996 and 2003, he was named British designer of the year four times, and was later awarded a CBE. In 1996, he became head designer at Givenchy in Paris, which led to him being dubbed the “hooligan of English fashion” and an “enfant terrible” by the French press, on account of his close-cropped hair and Doc Marten boots.

He left in 2001, saying the role was “constraining his creativity”, and took charge of Gucci instead. Later, he opened a string of boutiques in the world’s fashion capitals.

Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue, said: “Lee McQueen influenced a whole generation of designers. His brilliant imagination knew no bounds as he conjured up collection after collection of extraordinary designs.

“At one level he was a master of the fantastic, creating astounding fashion shows that mixed design, technology and performance and on another he was a modern-day genius whose gothic aesthetic was adopted by women the world over.”

Last night, McQueen’s family gathered at his father Ronald’s home, a detached brick house in Hornchuch, Essex. McQueen’s father was too distraught to speak but one of the designer’s brothers said: “We are suffering.”

A neighbour, who asked not to be named, said: “It’s terrible, his mother died only a few days ago – I don’t even know if they have had the funeral yet. He must have been so upset at his mum’s death that he couldn’t go on. It’s just so sad.”