London Fashion Week Day Three It all started 200 million years ago!” said Mary Katrantzou by way of explaining tectonic plates built into the bared backs of her dresses, and lace inspired by slimy green foliage. The designer, who started six years ago the fashion for wild mixes of digital prints, had already moved away from pattern. But […]

Paul Smith, like all tailors, is a man who enjoys a straight line. If there were any curves at the designer’s show, I missed them – apart from the bodies of the sporty models and a squishy handbag. The rest of the show was about stripes, a nautical-meets-office parade of jackets, skirts and dresses, perhaps with […]

London Fashion Week Day Three As Cara Delevingne and her famous eyebrows opened the Topshop Unique show, the model’s mother, Pandora, cheered her on with a “go-girl!” fist – and the mood was set for the brand that best interprets a twenty-first century Swinging London. The cheap and cheerful clothes from the ever-expanding global empire of Philip Green, […]

Miniature palm trees with branches made of shocking pink feathers rose from gilded trunks – this was the runway backdrop for the Matthew Williamson show. The setting was glamorous, colourful – and from a country hot in every sense. But while in his younger, Ibiza-loving days the designer’s clothes were always steeped in sexuality, his approach is […]

The basics of a Marios Schwab collection is the human body. He has, in the past, even produced collections devoted to mapping out the skeleton under the flesh. But this season, the show was a light rendition of body sculpture. Early outfits were in colours of putty and clay, and were recognisable wardrobe pieces – from a […]

  Richard Nicoll is known for concise tailoring. That is what took him to Cerruti’s design studio and how he built his own brand. This season’s general fashion focus on the tailored shirt and sporty soft wear ought to have been his moment. But the Nicoll woman went in a different direction, with the tailoring so […]

Henry Holland sent out a lazy collection, focused on flowers, but without the irony that gave earlier House of Holland collections their wit and edge. The storyline was supposedly young groupies out for a good time at seedy backroom gigs. But the problem with floral is that flowers are intrinsically innocent, and also a staple of […]

Ten years on, Marchesa has stepped away from the red carpet, lowered the wattage on Hollywood glamour and celebrated its birthday with flowers. Georgina Chapman and Keren Kraig, the duo behind the brand, claimed a “modern-gypsy Woodstock spirit”. But by coming back to show in London dresses that were a mass of embroidered flowers and only intermittently sweeping […]

London Fashion Week Day Two   Next Wednesday, Jonathan Anderson – the latest wunderkind of British fashion – turns 30. But he gave himself a birthday gift in advance: a strong Summer 2015 collection. The show was good, if not great, and it proved the extraordinary progress of a designer who started with menswear in 2008, showed his first […]

Suzy Menkes at London Fashion Week: Day Two   Duro Olowu is the essence of the multicultural dynamo that is London. “I am a British designer with a Nigerian heritage and an important business in America,” said Olowu, as he showed his new collection, inspired by Saint-Louis in northwest Senegal. Phew! That all sounds rather chaotic. […]