London Fashion Week: Now it's London's turn to shine again

As designers put the finishing touches to their collections for Fashion Week, Hilary Alexander is given a special preview

It's a nail-biting business, photographing a London Fashion Week (LFW) preview; tempers can fray as quickly as the unfinished seams on the clothes.

	This LFW will not disappoint

A work experience student arrives with a jacket, a silk top and a skirt, which the team at David David "ran up specially, just last night".

The skirt's waistband has no button or buttonhole and the jacket is a man's, because the girls' ones have not been made yet - but if the model pushes the sleeves up and puts her hands on her hips, it will work.

A motorbike courier rushes in with a plastic bag containing a House of Holland tartan coat, hot off the cutting-table. The Ossie Clark smock dress is fabulous, but the green snakeskin belt that goes with it is only half-made and held together with paper-clips.

And "wonder boys" Christopher Kane and Marios Schwab have hardly started making their collections, so my requests for samples were greeted with shrieks of disbelief.

However, the Vivienne Westwood outfit - from her first collection to appear on the LFW stage in nearly a decade - has arrived. A beautifully tailored skirt and jacket with a wild Mongolian goat-hair coat, it is perfectly finished, pressed and they've even sent shoes.

How times change: about 18 years ago, I went backstage at Westwood during LFW (before she decamped to Paris) to find a seamstress hunched over a Singer making a dress - and this was half-an-hour after the show should have started.

Dame Vivienne has, of course, grown up, but the new breed of young designers still exudes that chaotic creativity which gives LFW its unique personality.

London fashion tends to go on and off the boil - but right now it is bubbling over.

Last season, the potent mix of red-carpet glamour (at the gala opening of the Golden Age of Couture exhibition at the V&A), royalty on the catwalk (the Duchess of York and Princess Beatrice modelled for Naomi Campbell's star-studded charity event), and blockbuster shows from some of the most exciting designers since John Galliano and Alexander McQueen first appeared, combined to make London the capital of cool.

But as in music, so it is in fashion: it's not enough to get to the top of the charts, it's how long you can hang on to the Number One slot that counts.

Yesterday's opening, with a schedule that featured the catwalk debut of Jaeger's "London" label and a preview of the best high-street looks from Topshop Unique, laid the foundations for another week buzzing with creativity.

The re-positioning of London as fashion's hotspot is the result of a strategy devised in part by Sir Stuart Rose of Marks &Spencer - outgoing chairman of the British Fashion Council - and turned into reality by its executive director, Hilary Riva.

It is certainly one that the new BFC chairman, Jaeger's Harold Tillman, intends to pursue vigorously. Its success lies in the mix of designers and in the balancing of the inevitable loss of one to the clutches of New York, Milan or Paris, by the recapture of another talent for our own line-up.

Thus, last season saw both Luella Bartley and Matthew Williamson making LFW comebacks and Stella McCartney showing in conjunction with Adidas.

This season, we may have lost the highly talented print-inspired Jonathan Saunders to the Big Apple, but we have gained Westwood who will show her Red Label collection on Thursday (her Gold Label will still be shown in Paris).

Other highlights include Giles Deacon's show and the relaunch of Ossie Clark, one of the most famous names of the 1960s and '70s.

The brand was bought last year by web entrepreneur Marc Worth, and the first collection has been designed by a hand-picked team headed by Avsh Alom Gur, a Central Saint Martins graduate, who has previously worked for Donna Karan and Chloé.

Two further LFW newcomers are Edward Sexton, a Savile Row tailor who trained Stella McCartney, and the Dundee-born Graeme Black, the former creative director of Salvatore Ferragamo.

Another attraction of LFW is the ever-growing band of sponsorship schemes which ensure that cash-poor but ideas-rich emerging talents have their moment in the spotlight.

The philanthropically based Fashion East, for example, gives three new designers the chance to show on a catwalk each season - this week's pick are David Saunders's David David collection, Noki-NHS, who uses recycled materials, and Central Saint Martins graduate Louise Gray.

The idiosyncratic Richard Nicoll, scissor wizard Roksanda Ilincic and the avant-garde Jens Laugesen are under the Fashion Forward banner.

A total of 20 names have received sponsorship from Topshop's New Generation scheme - including three of our hottest, hippest young designers: Christopher Kane, who was head-hunted by Donatella Versace while still a student; the young, high-tech knitter Louise Goldin; and Marios Schwab, whose body-conscious collection made for one of the most dazzling shows last season.

The highly creative - yet wearable - clothes previewed here certainly indicate that this LFW will not disappoint.