McQueen reigns supreme. That was the indisputable outcome of this season's London Fashion Week. The British designer, rumoured to be presenting his next collection in New York to encourage American sales, staged his best show in years and left all competition looking irredeemably inadequate.
Good staging is one of McQueen's greatest strengths; he has become the Andrew Lloyd-Webber of the fashion world. The outcome of this peerless presentation, however, is that his remarkable skills as a designer threaten to be obscured. Every season, he takes a notional theme and uses this to entertain the audience. In the past, models have had to walk through water and fire, they have been drenched in rain or spattered with paint.
This time, they paraded inside an enormous plexiglass box containing a wasteland snow scene in which a blizzard raged. At one point mid-show, seven iceskaters, dressed all in white by McQueen, glided through choreographed routines around the frozen set.
Enchanting though such scenes are, they present McQueen as a showman, not a master of fashion. So too do such trickeries as a bodice entirely covered in lumps of Swarovski rock crystal and a high-necked corset made from coils of silver. Virtuoso pieces of this kind - now widely imitated by other British designers - are not the items which will be manufactured for McQueen customers. Instead, such people will want to buy more of his superlative tailoring and cutting of unrivalled mastery.
Much of the show offered examples of work which has been seen before: cutaway frock-coats with clever draping around the neckline and matching, flared pants; dresses which hug the torso before flaring out in extravagant folds from the waist; and body-clinging jumpsuits liable to reveal any excess flesh whatsoever.
The novelty often lay in the choice of fabric - snakeskin for the jumpsuits, quilted nylon for the cutaway coats - and colour. A fitted sleeveless hoodie with matching flared skirt came out in raspberry pink, as did voluminous knits with rollnecks so big they could double up as snoods. Olive green - likely to be one of next autumn/winter's favourite shades - was another leitmotif, for puffa jackets or blanket-fringed cashmere polo-neck dresses.
Above all, there was a lavish amount of white, which tended to dominate every collection in London this season. Here is an explanation of McQueen's success: he is a better designer than any of his British contemporaries but still takes account of the same trends which influence the rest. So the other great story of the season - the predilection for Edwardian-style sweeping long skirts and high-necked blouses - could also be spotted at McQueen. It also turned up in abundance at Ghost, for example, where the blouses were decorated with embroidered panels, or lengths of ribbon and skirts were constructed from enveloping bed quilts.
NEW, young designer Markus Lupfer followed a similar path with his white, high-fastening cotton shirts with ruched fronts and turquoise cashmere skirts, while Deborah Milner - a talent to watch even if this time she produced a somewhat lacklustre and derivative collection - also went vaguely Merchant-Ivory, using fabrics which were among the most popular in British collections: boiled and felted wools.
This new-romanticism might suggest fashion's flirtation with minimalism has finally come to an end. This is not the case, however, because pared-back dressing is a style which suits the majority of women (even if not the majority of designers) today.
Badly executed, minimalism simply looks mean-spirited. To be successful, it demands the finest materials and the highest standards of execution. Few houses have the expertise or interest to achieve such standards, but one which has decided whole-heartedly to embrace the understated approach is Burberry. The venerable (there really is no other adequate adjective) British company has been given an entire make-over by an Italo-American team during the past year and now bears little resemblance to its former self. Clearly, the intention is to emulate the triumph of Gucci, which reinvented itself as a high-fashion house under the care of Tom Ford.
Designed by Roberto Menichetti, who used to work with Jil Sander, the first full collection of the new Burberry line was presented last week and proved to be an exercise in pared-back international taste. Consistent features were roomy suiting cut along mannish lines in the lightest of wools, exquisitely fine shearling coats in shades of blue and, once again, lots of winter white and olive green for heavy cotton knits and wrap skirts.
These were clothes sharing the same spirit of quiet and expensive authority as Hermes, designed by Martin Margiela, and Louis Vuitton, designed by Marc Jacobs. Only occasionally did a distinctively British sensibility break through, thanks to the employment of the traditional Burberry tartan - used in softer tones than formerly - for mohair knee-length coats and scoop-neck, apron-fronted dresses.
Burberry did not have exclusive possession of minimalism last week. Ben de Lisi has been a long-term loyal advocate of this approach for many years, and a new addition to its ranks is milliner Dai Rees, who this season presented his first, small collection of clothing. The best pieces here were knee-length shifts in oatmeal or sky-blue tweed with stiff inverted pleats at the back; in their austere simplicity lay a real sense of daring.
Also taking risks with minimalism was Amanda Wakeley, who showed butterscotch cashmere and silk tweed shifts of impeccable cut, together with a grey, herringbone tweed for suits and coats in which lines of fine fringing were the only permitted decoration.
Equally, her sheer-knit long grey dresses were given subtle surface relief by horizontal bands of colourless sequins, but nothing was allowed to interfere with the understated luxury of dove-grey suede trousers or a tunic top in sheared weasel fur. Remarkable as Alexander McQueen's theatrical wizardry may be, it ought not to mean British designers who adopt a more understated approach are overlooked.
