Women Lifestyle, Fashion, Health, Beauty and Personality

It will be all stilettos, all the time in the British capital next week as the fashion crowd flies in for London Fashion Week. The biggest names in British fashion will unveil their spring-summer collections as London Fashion Week. begins! London Fashion Week tends to be known for the big designer names, but a large part of it is actually about young up-and-coming designers. There is a large exhibition hall where they exhibit, and this is where we would generally go to look for interesting new designers.

While retailers feel the squeeze of the credit crunch, London Fashion Week is determined to buck the trend with a schedule packed with more parties than any previous season. Fashion Week is the subject both of effusive reporting and vexed debate ??? everyone agrees that London is inspiring and exciting, but short of funds and manufacturing facilities. In the words of Hilary Riva, of the British Fashion Council, it will ???never be Milan or Paris, but its creativity and diversity are the best???. The people who make it happen ??? from designers and models to editors and retailers ??? care passionately about it. We asked those who are most influential right now what London fashion means to them.

People say London lags behind New York, Milan and Paris in the fashion sweepstakes, but plenty of big names are on hand for the London extravaganza, which kicks off Saturday with several parties and begins in earnest with runway shows Sunday. “Over the past few years, London Fashion Week has actually been extremely strong,” said Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue. “There’s been a very creative, talented new generation of designers who have grown up and have now become quite established.”
She called London “a kind of petri bowl of fashion.”
On every level, London is the most extraordinary fashion city in the world. Our young, avant-garde designers exert huge influence on world creativity, even when they are selling clothes in very small numbers, or, like Pugh in the first year of his career, deliberately not selling their clothes at all, or regularly going bankrupt, like John Galliano in his first 10 years as a designer. So what is it that makes us so special? Why is our design genius so much more exciting than anything found in other fashion capitals?

London Fashion Week is funded by corporate sponsors and a grant from London’s City Hall. Several of last year’s sponsors have declined to fund it this year. A further threat to funding emerged last week when the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, revealed that government funding may also be under threat if action is not taken on the issue of underweight models.
The organisers of London Fashion Week are determined to create a bustling social timetable to show the remaining fashion capitals it can provide a fanfare as exciting, extravagant and lucrative as they can. As the London schedule threatens to be reduced to three days to provide New York with a more favourable slot, the last thing the capital needs is a subdued atmosphere.

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