Anti-fur protesters holding placards bearing the words "Julien Macdonald Fur Scum" stormed the designer's catwalk show at the Natural History Museum yesterday afternoon, making a dramatic start to London Fashion Week.
They were quickly removed by security guards and the show continued without further interruption, closing to a cheering crowd. An insouciant Macdonald took his bow in a sequined Union Jack blazer, his arm around a model in a bronze swimsuit.
Formerly head designer at Givenchy in Paris, Welsh-born Macdonald has earned a reputation for glitzy, glamorous, red-carpet clothes and his winter 2005 collection, aimed at the Russian market, made lavish and extensive use of farmed fur, a far cry from his more down-market Star range for Debenhams. His spring/summer collection staged yesterday on a catwalk lined with Persian carpets was all about decorative dresses with plunging necklines in Pucci-style prints adorned with predictable amounts of gold, glitter and sparkle.
Everything seemed designed to reflect light. An emerald lamé shift was a perfect St Patrick's Day number. But away from the glitter and the glare and a 60s look, there were carefree, low-voltage prom-style dresses in prairie checks and frothy frou frou frocks that were less predatory and more romantic in spirit. Models, however, fought an uphill battle with wooden wedge heels, many staggering dangerously on the ramp.
Elsewhere, Elspeth Gibson showed a more demure and lighter side to glamour with sweet openwork white lace dresses and 50s-style coats in steel taffeta. A judicious scatter of pearls and crystal on cashmere or chiffon, a simple red brocade dress with a neatly swagged derrière and a ravishing eau de nil strapless gown hung with bronze polka dot netting showed there are more subtle ways to make sexy clothes.
London Fashion Week has lost yet again more stellar homegrown names to other fashion capitals: designers like Matthew Williamson, Boudicca, Roland Mouret and Alice Temperley now show in New York and with them go media interest and attention.
Nevertheless, Stuart Rose, chairman of the British Fashion Council, is keen to present London as a hotbed of young fashion talent, an incubator of new-generation stars. Some may emerge over the next four days with some 50 designers presenting catwalk collections and an additional 170 showcasing their collections in the exhibition tent.
Top Shop, now the single biggest supporter of young fashion designers in the industry, will be staging a catwalk show tomorrow in Berkeley Square which will be attended by US media and buying teams impressed with the transatlantic success of its recent opening in New York.
Irish stalwarts of the industry like John Rocha and Paul Costelloe are showing on Wednesday and Thursday. This morning, in a new initiative to attract UK buyers, Enterprise Ireland will be presenting its first London catwalk show at the Irish Embassy previewing the spring summer 2006 collections from seven of Ireland's "most inspirational designers", while another Irish designer, Mary Donoghue from Dublin, is one of the four finalists for the Fashion Fringe award worth £100,000; the winner will be announced on Wednesday.