London's much-vaunted status as a hotbed of youthful innovation was put to the test yesterday with strong presentations from rising stars such as Marios Schwab and Christopher Kane, whose catwalk shows were sponsored by Topshop.
Scottish-born Kane rose to fame quickly. Barely out of Central St Martins in 2006, he was headhunted as a consultant by Donatella Versace and last year dressed Gossip singer Beth Ditto for Fashion Rocks.
Schwab (28), a Greek/Austrian designer, made an acclaimed debut in London last year and recently won a €100,000 Swiss Textile Award.
Drawing on a story called The Yellow Wallpaper, of a woman driven mad by enforced confinement, Schwab's show opened with long, skin-tight neoprene dresses with scorch holes revealing other fabrics underneath.
Such enforced corsetry acted as a brake on the gait of the models, but as the show progressed - at a halting march - a certain strange beauty emerged from the highly worked fabrics, like a figure-hugging dress of black laser-cut lace and silk, and one in soft, feathered William Morris prints.
Showpieces included a cropped black jacket with sleeves ornately silvered with broken crystal and another in ostrich feathers of midnight blue, making for some real glamazon finales. Well, this is London after all.
Kane's show brought elaborate workmanship to new heights, using crystal, sequins and intricate metallic embroideries.
There were nods to his Celtic roots with floor-length Aran knit tabards, cabled waistcoats and swinging grey knit dresses, all embossed in some way with oversize black sequins. This mix of rustic with high glamour, the dense and the delicate, was expressed in a jacket so heavily inwrought with silver that it looked like armour, and in a sequinned shift layered with sheer and smoky-shaded chiffons.
Another extraordinary item was a matador jacket studded with Gehry-style cardboard pleats. Stunning stuff.
If the rising stars impressed, Paul Smith, the giant of British fashion with stores in more than 33 countries, staged a disappointing collection devoid of his usual playful irony and stylishly reinvented classics.
Give the man a traditional suit and he lets his wizardry fly season after season, but baggy black coats, shiny cream jackets and green and orange boucle wools, the colours of the Irish flag, made for a lacklustre show. Pink flowerpot hats didn't help either, nor did fabrics showing visible thongs.
Dublin Fashion Week is holding a public show on February 26th at the IFSC, showcasing designers including John Rocha, Deborah Veale and Joanne Hynes. Tickets are €55 and available from www.dublinfashionweek.com