CARVEN
Guillaume Henry, the first kind assistant designer at Givenchy, is carving out a type of sharply tailored separates, whose abbreviated lengths, shrunken and high-waisted proportions cause them to become very particular.
You don't only need money to use these clothes, you'll need oodles of poise. They're lavish dolly clothes: suede dresses lasered in fine ribbons, inverted box-pleated miniskirts with brocade,, shortish covers with lashings with dyed coat and adorable jackets in stripy silk or chartreuse wool tweed, with matching shorts and clompy Mary Janes. The jackets would be the easiest sell, although their high, narrow armholes mean they are not for the ample busted or wide-backed. Très elegant, though. LA
LANVIN
During his 10-year reign at Lanvin, Alber Elbaz has revealed himself to become one fashion's finest designers. As of this show, he proved he is able to hold a tune, too. "This is really a song for the people I love, and who reduced the problem make my dream be realized," said Elbaz, like a curtain swept back after the catwalk to show the designer on stage having a microphone along with a velvet-jacketed backing band behind. His range of song - Que Sera, Sera - plus the last song inside the show - It absolutely was Just One Of Those ideas - prompted some febrile fashionologists to invest that this could have marked a goodbye. Let's hope not, because of this greatest-hits collection, including hourglass scuba skirts and frill-entwined evening knockouts, proved all over again that Elbaz is masterful at emphasising everything a female wants to - and absolutely nothing she doesn't.
DRIES VAN NOTEN
The heart of the collection were beautiful prints of vintage costumes photographed by Van Noten on the V&A. Confined, initially, to silky patches on long felt skirts or wool trousers, they became progressively dominant. By evening, they'd absorbed: on high-necked, long-sleeved silk dresses or even the two-piece buttoned-up-shirt-and-long-skirt combinations which can be proving this kind of winning partnership.
The skill right here is the balance between adornment and utility - or at best utility through the lens of luxury. Cropped wool jackets with thick gold embroidered birds swooping across shoulders, calf-length black skirts embellished with horn, layers of colours that drift between sunny oranges and sludgy olives - and amongst it some terrific single-breasted tweedy coats, parkas and metallic block-heeled boots. With all of that, what did these designs include to look so miserable about? LA
ISABEL MARANT
Mother-of-pearl buttons ran down studded satin shirts panelled in black and ochre with prettily contra-coloured piping around the shoulder close to desert flower reliefs. Jeans and suede trousers that have been cut slim and stopped on the base of the calf had three gleaming stud-buttons about the leg, and butterflies fluttering on the hip pockets. The cowboy shirt was reinvented being a bomber jacket - cool - and also the cowboy boot turned into a spur-heeled cowboy shoe-bootie having an ammunition belt strap in the ankle.
It had not been all about cowboys, though: the Wild West's feminine tropes took a bow, too. The star was every Western's ruffle-tastic, lace-bedecked, seen-it-all saloon bar heroine, however with the hemlines radically rehashed from full-length to barely any length in any way. It was a mighty powerful look.
