Designers who put all the fun into fashion
Earlier this week a pack of eager fashion hounds, buyers, breathless students and general camp hangers-on trotted their way around the Serpentine, guided by pouting Lily Allen lookalikes clutching red balloons showing us all the way to the Luella show. After cups of coffee and pink pig-shaped meringues, Luella got the party started with a range of pretty puffy dresses and girly handbags.
At Marios Schwab, people were jostling for position and the excitement was palpable as no one knew what to expect from the half-Greek, half-Austrian 31-year-old. What they got was a whiff of safari and some tight dresses in muted shades that had been on the wrong end of a fight with a length of silver crystal rope.
This week, London is crackling with the vitality of Fashion Week. TV crews wait outside venues to pounce on anyone who looks as if they might know their Duro Olowu from their Todd Lynn. Pretty giraffe-limbed girls and boys who look like Viktor & Rolf are ferried around town like an eccentric school trip for the leggy and the fashion-crazed.
The unpredictability of London designers is part of their charm. New York Fashion Week has turned into a giant red carpet, hogged by Victoria Beckham and J-Lo, with a catwalk attached full of sheaths of impeccable taste and wearability (Manhattan is the spiritual home of smart casual).
Milan and Paris are about big-name hunting, where only the strongest survive. Which leaves London with all the fun of the fashion fair; its weakness (that success tends to emigrate) is its strength (there aren't the big names that secure the schedules in the other cities).
And it does work: there are designers who five years ago were showing on a friend's roof terrace who now see their clothes featured on supermodels in American Vogue. If you're experimental and free-spirited — like Erdem or Christopher Kane — London may be the only place you'll get a look-in because elsewhere, everyone's too busy staring at celebrities or sucking up to advertisers.
Even though London Fashion Week has been squeezed down to five days from next spring, the London lot will still be the most extreme. Gareth Pugh, he of the latex gimp suit a couple of years ago, is showing in Paris now.
Jonathan Saunders is already flying the flag in New York, McQueen and McCartney have the clout of international designers twice their age. London Fashion Week is the hothouse of fearless invention. Where else could a gimp costume be a passport to Paris?
