Made in NYC - thanks to Brits

New York Fashion Week is London's polar opposite. The designers are so generously bankrolled that even the crappy collections are at least executed with polish.

Compare this to London, where good creative ideas are so often ruined by the lack of commerce to see them through. It hardly seems fair. But fairness has no place in the fashion firmament.

And thus we get Jennifer Nicholson (daughter of Jack) and Kimora Lee Simmons (wife of Def Jam supremo Russell) being given slots on the schedule purely by dint of having the money to pay for them. Are they talented?

Irrelevant: Naomi Campbell models and Beyoncé sits front row and the column inches are all theirs. In New York, a frock is a frock is a frock until someone famous wears it.

But all the celebrity endorsement in the world can't cover up the creative void in New York fashion's soul. The city may be adept at churning out shirts, pencil skirts and evening dresses that will please the conservative US market, but don't expect to find much innovation. You need to go to Europe for that.

That is, unless Europe comes to you. New York embraces warmly any British designers who wish to show on the schedule, realising that their quirkiness makes for a more richly varied fashion week. This season, Luella Bartley and Matthew Williamson are joined by Roland Mouret, who shows this evening.

It is also no coincidence that many US design houses have Brits in key positions on their teams. Who did Francisco Costa, new designer at Calvin Klein, turn to give his first collection some oomph? London stylist Katie Grand.

Diane von Furstenberg has ex-St Martins student Nathan Jenden as her head designer, while DKNY has a fondness for London fashion college interns. Even Marc Jacobs asks the advice of Camille Bidault-Waddington, the stylist otherwise known as Mrs Jarvis Cocker.

Integrating British creativity into your American cash cow is a smart move.
At Jacobs, it pays off beautifully - specifically in the younger Marc line, which was a thrift-store homage to Ziggy Stardust.

Whatever you think of The Darkness, glam rock is going to be a big look next spring - if not with anodyne America, then certainly with the Marc loving teens who shop on the British high street.

For anodyne America, though, spring 2004 is going to be all about dresses. Isn't it always? New York Fashion Week is crowned queen of the dress, and here there was every permutation: modest tea-dresses at the politically resonant Miguel Adrover show, uptown cocktail dresses at Narciso Rodriguez and full-blown Oscar frocks at Oscar de la Renta.

Many designers, such as Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Jacobs's main line and Christophe Lemaire at Lacoste seem stuck on The Great Gatsby, for which read optimism, drop-waists, tennis skirts and a preponderance of white and lemon.

Postwar America could certainly do with a dose of optimism, and on this level, New York Fashion Week was a breezy success.

Happy 10th anniversary.

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