London must prove it’s still in fashion

LONDON Fashion Week, the country’s biggest style extravaganza, opened to the sounds of jazz legend Josephine Baker crooning her love to Paris in an arch message that forward fashion has moved elsewhere.

Ronit Zilkha, a longtime London shower with a whim for swinging chiffon dresses and scarecrow catwalk models, kicked off five days and 45 shows of spring-summer 2005 ready-to-wear style with a throwback 60 years into the past.

Ben de Lisi followed up with a modern take on the nurse’s candystripe, buttery pastels and bling-bling jewels, and cocktail dresses stripped away to reveal wide swathes of skin, both front and back.

But the British capital will have to work harder this week to attract attention, squeezed in between New York, Milan and Paris in a tight fashion season.

It still must prove to the world that it can withstand the flight of its best-known designers - Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano among them - to Paris, one of Baker’s two loves in her 1931 classic “J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris.”

In line with 60th anniversary celebrations this year of Europe’s World War II liberation, Zilkha flung us back to the streets of 1940s Europe, peopled by ladies in swinging skirts, wide-legged culotte-style pants and low-cut one-piece bathing suits.

She makes an attempt to make the post-war period sexy, slicing slits up to the waist on micro-dotted dresses and plunging her bathing suit front opening down to the navel. But those elegant efforts are countered by an unfortunate emphasis on Scottie dogs patterned playfully on fabrics and stamped in glitter on T-shirt fronts. The whole theme was accented by stuffed toy poodles carried by models on the catwalk, who held them as lovingly as yesterday’s trash being hauled to the bin.

Zilkha did however produce a graceful match of polka dots and floral patterns in drop-waist dresses which will make for a very wearable ensemble when the sun comes back next spring.

Although the crowd came for his clothes, Ben de Lisi seemed to make a bold statement about the sexiness of the back. Elegant diaphanous chiffon dresses plunged far past the bust, headed toward the navel, or scooped the back out partially or totally.

His catwalk bloomed with florals from iridescent numbers to large and chunky ones to soft and fluttering varieties.