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The phenomenal success of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty over the last three months will likely rank it among the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s top 20 exhibits since the museum began tracking attendance 50 years ago.

Savage Beauty is on track to supersede Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, which set the attendance record for a fashion exhibition when it bowed to 576,000 guests back in 2008. Meanwhile, McQueen has been breaking records since it opened in early May, becoming the museum’s second biggest opening in history, behind Vincent Van Gogh’s The Drawings.

Several factors are attributed to Savage Beauty’s triumphant run: the wedding dress designed by Sarah Burton for Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge; the insufferable heat; a booming tourist season. But most important is the exhibit’s mass appeal. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty manages to transcend fashion while standing alone as a testament to a great artist and his incredible legacy.

As Edward Murguia, a 67-year old sociology professor from Texas A&M University — perhaps the last person you’d expect to find at a retrospective for a British designer who hanged himself over a year ago — observed: “You take a medium like fashion that you don’t think is going to have that much depth, and then you find that it does…I could never imagine how much he got done in such a short life.” [NYT]