Anna Wintour showed up at Nicole Farhi (who is interviewed below) and at Unique. Naomi Campbell, Ellie Goulding, Kelis, and Nicola Roberts also attended the latter.
Goulding and Erin O’Connor appeared at Marios Schwab. Kate Moss, Eliza Doolittle, Olivia Palermo, and Kristen Stewart turned up at Mulberry, and Wintour and Sienna Miller attended Matthew Williamson’s spring–summer 2012 collection.
Williamson’s collection was notable for his prints and flowing dresses, as well as his use of bright, tropical shades, continuing the voluminous and colourful trends for the spring. Mulberry, too, went colourful with lemon and pink, as well as complex prints and a good use of lace.
If you follow Burberry on Twitter you will have seen yesterday's London fashion week collection before Anna Wintour, Kanye West, Philip Green or Sienna Miller did.
For the first time, the label "live tweeted" the show on Monday from backstage, posting photographs of each look on Twitter moments before the model stepped on to the catwalk. At 4.15pm Burberry was the third most popular topic globally on the social media, as fashion-watchers compared notes.
When you consider that it was not long ago that high street stores smuggled spies into catwalk shows in order to glean clues as to what might be in stores in six months' time, this is quite a turnaround.
But still – live stream or no live stream – you had to be there. Kensington Gore, where the show was staged under the shadow of the Albert Memorial, was a scene. The seating arrangements alone at a major catwalk show are a piece of theatre, complete with A-list improv: Anna Wintour directly opposite Andy Murray; Paul Weller and Kanye West bookending a phalanx of blondes. Ben Kingsley was there for cultural gravitas, and the MP Ed Vaizey to defend the sartorial honour of London's mayor after recent sniping in this paper. (Vaizey also weighed in on the hot debate currently gripping the front row. He suggests: watch Downton Abbey, record Spooks.)
For a label whose heritage is as British as a wet bank holiday weekend, the Indonesian and African references in the prints and beading were a surprise. Bailey was at pains to explain that the message was in the craftsmanship, not the multiculturalism. "I love the contradiction between the digital world, of which we at Burberry are a part, and these hugely time-consuming crafts which rely on skilled people," he explained backstage after the show, in brief air pockets between air kisses with supermodels and guy-hugs with rock stars. "Both of those things are part of Burberry, and today I wanted to bring them together."
Kane's approach is smart on two counts. Instead of pouring his creativity into building a brand signature, he has made a label at which creativity itself is what the Christopher Kane brand is about. The DNA of the label is inside his head, from where no hostile takeover can annexe it. And his fans – whose numbers swell every season – are motivated to buy a piece every season, because each collection offers something new. The new black, at London fashion week, is business sense.
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