Every season brings at least one - an overseas designer who concludes London Fashion Week is the only place to be seen. Yesterday it was the turn of Betsey Johnson, an American with a career of some three decades behind her who has suddenly decided to forsake New York, where she usually shows, for what she clearly hoped would be a more sympathetic audience in England.
Johnson is not perceived kindly by her domestic fashion press who find yellow hair and a fondness for pink clothing unbecoming in someone who ought by now to have achieved a certain dignity.
The noted English tolerance of eccentricity, coupled with the opening of a new shop in London, persuaded her to transfer operations this season, and so yesterday morning Betsey Johnson showed her spring/summer 1999 collection in south Kensington.
It was unfortunate that most members of the audience were still talking about Alexander McQueen's use of computer-operated paint guns the night before. However, even without Sunday's abiding memories, it is unlikely Betsey Johnson would have won much sympathy.
Her clothes are simply too wacky, too thrift-shop-accretion of the kind sported by Madonna when the singer first came to fame in the 1980s to win much support now. A typical Johnson ensemble looked as though Marie-Antoinette had sent one of her more outre dresses to the laundry and got it back shrunk.
Thanks to a profusion of net, sequins and beading, other items would not have seemed out of place in a ballroom dancing competition. If Betsey Johnson was looking for a positive response when she came out at the end of her show and performed cartwheels on the ramp, disappointment lay ahead.
She would have done better to follow the example of young(ish) French designer Roland Mouret who showed later yesterday, proffering a mere 13 outfits which demonstrated his skill in draping fabric. Each piece skimmed the body and fell in graceful folds of silk and linen.
The quiet simplicity of Mouret's work is more in tune with the spirit of the age than Johnson's garish attempts at evoking youthful joie de vivre could ever hope to be.