Fashion: The end (for the moment)

Sarah Mower in the Telegraph

Amazingly, the one thing almost no one in Paris and Milan had applied themselves to is how to make pragmatic, smart, uplifting daywear for someone who goes about her business in a city. Dries van Noten, with his accessible, silky, graphically rational system of dressing, was the only designer in Paris to win universal applause from both press and buyers on that score - and he's a Belgian.

And now I've limped home and reviewed the 148 shows I've seen for next spring/summer, it strikes me that I want nothing to do with anything that's going to be touted as a mainstream fashion trend. In that sense, yep, fashion's over.

If I'm going to spend, it will be on things whose value I calculate in terms of love+price+longevity; stuff I know will still be valid two or three years hence. I would much rather spend money on something that is not an obvious part of a big-brand operation. Oh, and I won't be bothering with passing novelties that turn out to be one-wear disasters: jumpsuits, that means you.

I'm convinced that's the mentality most women will be applying to fashion next year, if not already. I'm only likely to be tempted now by fantastically well-thought-out elements of urban elegance, or things that deliver surprise and delight in a delicious package of usefulness. And when I check back over the season, I find that it's London's designers - usually marginalised as infant crazies or unrealistic fantasists - who have had the clarity to come up with all that.

In the confusion that's reigned over the season, our British-based community of designers (and I include people who show in New York and Paris) pitched things so excellently that their collections stand up incredibly well against much bigger international labels whose shows lurched all over the place.