London Fashion Week: the trends from spring/summer 2013

London Fashion Week: the trends from spring/summer 2013

If the fashion catwalk cameo at the closing ceremony of the Olympics underwhelmed, it was because it represented everything that British fashion no longer is. It isn't - give or take a few international fashion editors - pompous. It isn't, apart from a few, best-ignored, designers, bombastic. It doesn't take itself too seriously and the models, on the whole, are troopers trying to make a living, not spoilt divas who haven't yet twigged that out-of-control egos are very last-decade. If we have a USP, it is, as Mulberry's creative director Emma Hill said, following the Mulberry blockbuster yesterday at Claridge's "a sense of humour. You don't need to tamper with things too much. Our natural style is very cool."
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But without wit and playfulness, cool becomes painfully tedious. Whether it's the crazy-but-inspired clashing prints of designers such as Clements Ribeiro, Preen and Mary Katrantzou, or the boffinish invention of Erdem, Christopher Kane and Jonathan Saunders, with their gung-ho approach to synthetics, holograms, neon lace and patent, and mixing them all together, as this week proved, British fashion is now an Olympic-level sport. I'm not only referring to Jessica Ennis, who was front row at Mulberry, or Victoria Pendleton and Andy Murray who were at Burberry. Exports are up, admittedly from a modest baseline, despite a hellish retail climate in much of the world, and waiting times are down. Shows run disconcertingly on time. Or they do in fashion-speak. They're still about 15 minutes late, but that's an incidental. In Paris, it's 40 minutes minimum. This matters. Like the Olympics, London Fashion Week is a global platform that allows us to show what we can do, not just creatively, but technically and organisationally.
IN PICTURES: London Fashion Week spring/summer 2013: Celebrities on the front row
We can do quite a lot, it seems. You used to be able to rely on three or four names delivering the design goods. Now there are probably 15 or so, plus a bunch who don't deliver anything much - but that's a given in any fashion capital. Venues are plush, when they're not car parks. Front rows are no longer adorned solely with Big Brother contestants and, somehow, sponsorship continues to prop up the more hand-to-mouth designers… but why am I doing a sales pitch?
It isn't like this in New York. At NYFW, American journalists roll their eyes at the banality of many of the designers on their schedule. In Milan, Italian newspaper journalists watch the shows with a mixture of boredom and befuddlement (they don't do specialists in Italy; next week they'll be covering a motor show or be on royal-nipple alert). As for Paris, it's so secure in its position at the epicentre of catwalk fashion and luxury that if the tumbrils are rolling up those cobbled streets, no one can be bothered to listen.
London can't quite shake off the sense that it's an underdog. Not even when its bigger shows are packed with the international buyers and editors who, only a few seasons ago, bypassed the city altogether. Everyone becomes patriotic to the point of partisanship.
In the interests of objective appraisal, what we don't have much of at London Fashion Week is conventional sexiness. Apart from Antonio Berardi (or Roland Mouret who shows in Paris), British designers like to scoot around sex, preferring to flirt with androgyny, eccentricity or playing the kook card. Nothing wrong with that. It would be mind-sappingly depressing if all our designers churned out bandage dresses and trophy-wife baubles. They don't and that's why our designers will never sell as much as Roberto Cavalli or even Azzedine Alaïa. And it's why a behemoth such as Harrods, one of the most successful department stores in the world, has a relatively small stock of British labels. Sex, as William and Kate learnt this week, beats out everything else in the commercial stakes. British designers know that. The fact that they continue to view fashion as something more than - as Katharine Hamnett famously put it - clothes to get laid in, makes them all the more valuable.