London falling?

Feature It is known for launching some of the industry's most flamboyant talent, but London Fashion Week is struggling.

The British Fashion Council is aligning itself with young, up-and-coming designers, such as those from Central St Martins College.

London Fashion Week begins today, with its customary cacophony of excitement, angst, panic, denial and Cool Britannia-style self-promotion. In frock-watcher circles, it is the most controversial of occasions, and this year especially so, as a simmering rivalry with New York comes to a furious boil over the refusal of the Council of Fashion Designers of America to back down on their plans to run concurrently with London next year. If this goes ahead, the British capital will be left with just three or four days to show, rather than the usual six. This Tuesday, a summit of the leaders of the various fashion organisations from Milan, Paris, New York and London will meet to try to resolve the issue, but whatever the result, the city's image has taken a beating.

The four big fashion weeks of each season are the most important dates in the trade calender for stylists, buyers, designers and fashion journalists. New York, London, Milan and Paris not only establish the trends that will carry through to the high street several months later in watered-down versions that we'll all be wearing come spring, but they are also the balance on which a designer's success is weighed. A few dodgy reviews from Style.com and last year's darling could be this year's has-been. Play it safe and you risk being labelled "commercial" (oh, the horror!) and sidelined in favour of the new enfant terrible; take too many risks and department-store buyers will consider you "uncommercial" (equally unthinkable) and give your collection a miss.

And it's not just designers whose reputations are at risk: it's the fashion week as a whole. Will Milan be extravagant or predictable? Is New York classic or boring? Has Paris lost the plot? And does anyone care about London any more? Well, that's a bit harsh. After all, London has been the launch pad for some of the world's most creative, flamboyant and successful designers - John Galliano and Alexander McQueen being the most commonly cited; though the likes of Stella McCartney, Christopher Kane, Christopher Bailey and Vivienne Westwood are no less important. It is internationally loved for its anarchic approach to fashion, its punky aesthetic, its youth and vigour. However, it is internationally derided for the same qualities.

The last couple of seasons had seen the much-lauded return to London of the likes of Alice Temperley, Matthew Williamson (for one season only) and Vivienne Westwood (with her Red Label, not the main line), as well as a flurry of excitement when - gasp - Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of US Vogue, put the city back on her schedule, a sure sign of a return to form. British designers were suddenly the ones to watch - Christopher Kane singlehandedly brought back the "body-con" trend and, it could be argued, paved the way for the return of the original body-con kings, Hervé Léger and Azzedine Alaïa. A whole crew of new designers appeared on the scene, previously unknown yet suddenly name-dropping material, such as Roksanda Ilincic, Richard Nicoll, Danielle Scutt, Louise Goldin, Marios Schwab and Erdem Moralioglu.

This season, though, the power struggle between the fashion weeks has been thrilling the blogosphere and fashion editors for months. From the damp squib that was this year's Model Health Enquiry, which the British Fashion Council had hoped would persuade the other style capitals to end the use of starving models (for a while Britain was the proud pioneer, thrusting ahead of those old fuddy-duddies in Paris, Milan and New York, but in the end the plan was rejected by its global counterparts) to the current clash with New York, London has been undermined and the gloom has descended, along with economic misery, political disillusionment and crushed ambition.

This turn of events has only served to emphasise the precariousness of London's position, particularly with some of the "second-tier" fashion weeks, such as Mumbai, Sydney and São Paulo, nipping at its heels. If the British Fashion Council attempted to pull the same trick, deliberately showing at the same time as New York, there's little doubt that the Big Apple would be in a strong enough position to shrug its power-suited shoulders and say, "Go ahead, punks: make our day". The prospect of either New York or London attempting the same trick with Milan or Paris is simply inconceivable.

This may seem a meaningless argument: after all, surely market forces mean that whichever fashion week is the more important to buyers will come out on top, full stop. But this rather utilitarian approach fails to take into account the less quantifiable offerings of London - the creativity, the highly trained graduates, the support for young talent - that simply don't work as well in the rest of the world. Without the genius of the London-trained John Galliano behind it, would Dior's extravagantly feminine collections be as wonderful as they are today? Would a designer as young and fresh as Kane have been able to break through in the labyrinthine schedules of Paris or Milan?

One of Villa Moda's buyers, Natalie Van Rooyen, is attending London Fashion Week, and raves about the attractions of both the city and its designers. "I think the reason the designers are so innovative is that London is a melting pot of cultures and nationalities and background, so they get inspiration from everything around them," she says. "How could you not be inspired? When I first went to London I was really amazed by the people, the dress sense, their own sense of style. That's what keeps the designers fresh. You do find that edge in London - our clients get bored easily, so we need exciting clothes. We've seen a lot of shifting from big names like Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana and so on, to something different and more individual, and in London you find all these brands. We buy, to name a few, Vivienne Westwood, Pringle of Scotland, Liberty of London, Christopher Kane, Jonathan Kelsey, Nicholas Kirkwood, Ossie Clark and Linda Farrow. We have to keep fashion fresh."

Sue Evans, the senior fashion editor for the online trend forecaster WGSN.com, who has been reporting on the international fashion weeks for about 30 years, agrees: "I think London gives the fashion world a little more creativity than other cities on the fashion circuit," she argues. "Not just through the designers showing but from the whole buzz that surrounds fashion week - the way the kids dress, the parties etc. Of course a lot of it is hype and designers come and go with alarming speed, but buyers do come here for that fashion fix, which they don't get anywhere else."

The British Fashion Council's decision to embrace London's reputation and align itself strongly with young, up-and-coming designers could prove its saviour, offering the world a different take on fashion by encouraging the talents of the strongest graduates from some of the best fashion schools in the world, such as Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and the Royal College of Art. With sponsorship opportunities such as New Gen, which helped launch the likes of Alexander McQueen, House of Holland and Sophia Kokosalaki, and Fashion Forward, which is currently helping Kane, Schwab, Ilincic and Moralioglu to get their businesses on a secure footing, London is breaking plenty of new talent and helping it survive once it's there.

Carving a unique path will inevitably involve hitting some rocks, though. "London doesn't have the polish of Paris or Milan, though I think that's because we do encourage all this creative energy - possibly mistaking it for true talent," says Evans. "But I think we need to go back to the roots of the business and educate fashion students more about the actual machinations and the commercial aspects of the industry.

"I am not sure many designers will survive through hard times," she warns, "purely because there are so many who are relatively inexperienced and who certainly don't have the business acumen. I was talking to a buyer the other week who has had to stop trying to support young design talent because they don't deliver the goods and she can no longer risk budget on orders that may not arrive or if they do are shoddily made. I think the current climate will sort the men from the boys as it were and there will be less room for off-the-wall designers who bring a lot of hype to the table but little else. Buyers will have to be far more cautious and will be thinking of their bottom line."

Certainly, caution is a strong motivation in Van Rooyen's buying, in spite of her customers' demand for the new and different. "I've been lucky and not really experienced any of those problems of poor quality and distribution, but I hardly pick up anyone from New Gen. Last season I did pick up Richard Nicoll, though, and the quality is really good. But some of the young designers, you have to just watch from season to season, because they're not yet realistic, they haven't done the research, and some of the prices are outrageous for a start-up. Of course it's challenging, but it's only the stronger ones that come back season after season. And from our side we have to make sure that we aren't part of the problem. Young designers have small budgets and if someone pays late it can ruin their whole production line. As a buyer I would like to support more young designers, but commercially it's difficult if our budgets are delayed because of building or whatever."

This week will be crucial for the British fashion industry, of that there is no doubt. But as long as London can retain its USP - young, creative designers given the support they need - it looks like it will stay in the diaries of most forward-looking fashion professionals. "London's the place for energy and edge," confirms Van Rooyen. "Milan Fashion Week is never really interesting in terms of finding new designers and Paris Fashion Week is very pretentious so it would be hard for anyone new to break through. New York Fashion Week is interesting, though - we usually find interesting young designers in New York." New York, huh? London's nemesis strikes again.
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