The Business Of Fashion Week

The Business Of Fashion Week

A DECADE ago, London Fashion Week was just a tearaway little sister to three more established elders: seen-it-all, done-it-all, post-coital-cigarette-smoking Paris; corporate focused, financially fly New York; and straight-A student (albeit smouldering) Milan. In those days, London's most successful designers inevitably eventually graduated to one of these international outposts, but today its reputation for producing talent affords us a fairer share of the global limelight.

Natalie Massenet was named chairman of the British Fashion Council a year ago, and we're now beginning to see signs of the effect she and the weight of her £350m company is having: significantly inflated sponsorship; 75 12-ft flags hanging the length of Oxford Street; Manolo Blahnik and Smythson on the schedule for the first time; a new designer shop in Somerset House during Fashion Week; constant chatter on the social mediawaves - plenty of new developments will be credited to Massenet's leadership. She insists, however, that the developing success of the event is down to the expertise of BFC chief executive Caroline Rush. Massenet's self-determined brief is in her efforts to bring British fashion close to the consumer. "In New York everybody knows when Fashion Week is on - it feels like Fashion Week - I want it to be the same here," she says.