What Ozwald did next

He's the most talked-about tailor on Savile Row, whose suits are coveted by dandies and film stars alike. But does the sight of his Russian model wife on stage at his latest show signal a radical career change?

We're running 45 minutes late in the Salon Impérial, the ornately beautiful core of Paris's InterContinental Hotel, and there's still no sign of Mohamed Al Fayed. The room is huge. Elaborate chandeliers dangle above our heads, and the ceiling is decorated with Sistine-style frescoes, full of Arcadian nymphs and swains twisting hay-ropes and holding a sign saying "Salve Flore" (or "Hello, flower"). But my mood is far from blissful. I'm beginning to harbour feelings of ill will against Mr Fayed. My one and only chance of sitting in the front row at a Paris fashion event, and the Harrods boss with the passport problem has screwed it up.

Admittedly, when I got the invitation to the catwalk show of Ozwald Boateng's "Collection prêt-à-porter automne/hiver 2004-5", I was surprised to find myself booked into row numéro un, but hell, when you've been a cutting-edge fashion guru as long as I have, few things surprise you. To find oneself sitting with celebrities... it was an exciting prospect. Last week, at the Julien Macdonald show, Boateng had sat in the front row next to Christina Aguilera. Who'd be my neighbour? Kylie Minogue? Pink? Michelle Mcthingy off Pop Idol?

After I'd queued in the InterContinental's imposing lobby for an hour or so, and finally hit the Salon, I found no trace of my name among the white cardboard place-names in the front row. A young woman told me to grab a chair in row 4, and be content there. Ozwald, it seemed, had met Mr Fayed at a party the previous night and, naturellement, had to invite him to the show. If he showed up, the billionaire could hardly be dumped at the back of the room, along with the Epsilons from "Mutton Dressed" magazine, could he? So, dethroned, I sat fuming, my elbows jogged by the chairless masses blocking out the light. The press pack for the row 4 nobodies yielded two phials of perfume - one all fruit, the other all flowers. It's the new Ozwald Boateng Parfum Bespoke Pour Femme, and the ideas is for the lady to combine them "to compose her own sensual perfume". What was this all about?

The room darkened and a film began on the mile-high screen. It opened on a snowy landscape in what might be a field in Russia (though it could, equally, be Richmond Park). Close-up of an elderly, snow-bearded Russian nobleman reading an ancient book, his demeanour suggesting a curious hybrid of Leo Tolstoy and Buster Merryfield from Only Fools and Horses. The old geezer is wearing a gorgeous three-quarter-length black cashmere overcoat, and the wind flaps it open to reveal a luscious orange-pink lining. Cut to footage of a dozen young males tramping through the snowy steppes in trendy suits. Then the designer himself appears, a lanky vision in a fawn overcoat. "I'm looking into the future," says the elder man, narrowing his eyes. "What d'you mean?" asks Ozwald. "If you cannot visualise," says the old guy in gravelly, Ancient Mariner tones, "then you cannot see..."

Ozwald is big on films. One of his first moves, on hitting Savile Row in 1995, was to commission a video, MTV-style, showing him as an exotic outsider - black, stylish, freakishly tall - in the home of English tailoring, running towards the camera, pursued down the street by old-fashioned Row geezers, tape measures flying, scissors clicking in disapproval. Since then, he hasn't just penetrated the British menswear establishment, he has become its most notorious figure.

Boateng generates column inches the way other men generate spots. His successes and failures (both of them spectacular) are minutely scrutinised by Savile Row and the City - and now by the world's top luxury-goods conglomerate, LVMH (Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton), which owns Givenchy, the brand that recently appointed Ozwald their menswear designer. He is a figure of enormous glamour, with a client list that extends from Keanu Reeves and Daniel Day-Lewis to Angus Deayton and Jonathan Ross (and, OK, Ken Livingstone).

He radiates self-confidence. Born in Wood Green, London, of Ghanaian stock, he started using a sewing-machine at 13, stitching linings into jackets for £40 a week. While studying computing at college, he made clothes for his fellow-students, and a girlfriend finally suggested that he took it up seriously. He moved into his first shop - not quite in Savile Row but just around the corner, in Vigo Street - in 1995. Three years later, he almost went bankrupt, when the Japanese retailer, through whom he was sending all his orders, abruptly went bust. Boateng was in disarray - none of the banks would lend him any money, and he was going through a divorce. He was bailed out by Debenhams, for whom he oversaw a cheaper "diffusion range" in their menswear department. Boateng came bouncing back, and finally moved into his beloved Savile Row proper (at No 12a) in January 2002, celebrating the event with a massive party that closed the whole street.

Back at the InterContinental, the show begins with a shock. First on to the catwalk is Gyunel Boateng, a 6ft-plus Russian goddess with her long blonde mane tied with long red ribbons. The designer's second wife, she is wearing a sensational calf-leather coat with fox-fur sleeves - but it is, incontrovertibly, a woman's coat. The significance of the moment, in fashion terms, is cosmic: it's Ozwald's first garment for ladies ever to appear on a catwalk. What is it doing here? Is he just showing off his gorgeous better-half?

The next 20 minutes pass in a blur of brown leather jackets, serious fur hats, aristocratic frock coats and purple peasant shirts, along with the Boateng trademarks and signature styles - orange shirts with green ties, wool and mohair jackets in startling blues and turquoises, acid linings in colours that hurt your eye. Dandies would have welcomed the fake-formal, plum-purple velvet jacket with a pinstripe printed on to it. Speed fiends with circulation problems would be pleased to note the new sheepskin coats and biker jackets. A swathe of new accessories, scarves, belts and suede travel bags (not handbags, thank you very much) were toted up and down the sprung runway by Ozwald's troupe of hirsute beefcakes. The Russian theme was hammered home with little mix'n'match details - military stripes and epaulettes, commissar hats, a six-pointed imperial gold star. If a stern historian might object that Ozwald was throwing together the iconography of four different styles - Cossack, Tsarist, Bolshevik and Soviet, with a dash of James-Bond-villain - there was no doubting his passion for all things Eastern European.

The show closed with an enormous fox fur that dwarfed the pretty substantial man inside it, and the appearance of Boateng himself, resplendent in a red suit, dancing down the catwalk beside (and around) his wife to the strains of OutKast's "Hey Ya!", pausing to slap hands with cronies and important friends, and kiss their palpitating wives. It's hard to convey the figure he cuts at these moments - a walking embodiment of triumph, aloofness and glee, the image of a man who, if he hasn't yet conquered the world, has at least a map of how to get there.

Backstage, he acts up for the cameras with the same hyperactive charm, pressing the flesh, pulling faces, employing a curious mannerism of placing his hand against your chest and going "boom-boom-boom", to suggest that your heart's going all arrhythmical because 6ft-4in of dark Ozwald charm is looming over you. His eyes, meanwhile, flicker nervously about the room, to see where the company bosses - the heads of LVMH and Givenchy - have got to, to gauge what they made of the show. For something is in the wind that is of great importance to the fashion world, and to Mr B especially. An announcement had been made that Julien Macdonald, head of womenswear for Givenchy, is saying, "Au revoir". And who might replace him? Amazingly, the smart money is on Boateng. He has never presented a women's range, nor, as far as we know, made a single frock, but his eye for colour and shape, the transforming magic of a good cut, has been clear to all for some years.

Givenchy started out as a byword for chic, when its founder, Hubert de Givenchy, dressed Audrey Hepburn in black, complete with hat and cigarette-holder, for Breakfast at Tiffany's. Hubert's successors - John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Julien Macdonald - have been much more flamboyant. Is Ozwald a natural successor to them? Is that where his ambitions are taking him next? Would this inscrutable, cautious man talk about it?

"I've been thinking about women's clothing for five years," he told me, "because the wife is always asking me to make her something." Yeah, but did he think it was time he moved into designing for women? "I'm already doing that. Didn't you see? I've just brought out a fragrance. I love having women say, 'I'm wearing Ozwald Boateng today'..."

He is stonewalling. He will talk only about his own-brand designs. "This show today - I feel like I've written a book about my relationship with Moscow, one of the sexiest, most fashion-conscious cities in the world. I've been there six times this year. I want to put the message across about its qualities of toughness and luxury, which are combined in my coats - in the leather and alpaca and fur..."

"Ozwald," I said. "What about Givenchy? Are you going to be head of womenswear, up there with the design Olympians?" He looked shocked, as if I'd blundered on a terrible personal secret, rather than something openly discussed in the fashion press for weeks. So what was he up to? "I've always wanted," he said, with careful emphasis, "to be in a position to fulfil my potential." What did that mean? He waved his hands irritably, as if these coded pronouncements were as clear as day to the cognoscenti. "I'm giving you the moment here. I'm saying that now, I feel able to fulfil my potential. I've now got the tools to... to fly."

That's as much as the Delphic Ghanaian is going to tell anyone. It's beyond question that he wants one of the top jobs in the fashion universe. And he's doing all that he can to drop hints that, design-wise, he and the female form divine are made for each other. They've all been teases - the perfume, the utterances about visualising the future, the wife on the catwalk and backstage, meeting the LVMH bosses (who hold the womenswear job in their gift), looking like a walking advertisement for what Ozwald can do for girls. Now, it's up to them.

There was, however, one more ace for him to play. It was the party on Sunday evening, back in the Salon Impérial. Long tables groaned under vats of tortellini in cream sauce, sculpted petits fours and salmon in aspic, not to mention champagne and vodka cocktails. And drifting through the rooms came a mind-boggling collection of women. They were mainly Russian models, friends and contacts of Gyunel, and they radiated a serene hauteur as they looked down at the lesser mortals (ie, those under 6ft tall), the men who gawped unashamedly at their cleavages, gazed up at their pristine teeth, their cushiony pouts, their cascades of hair. Oksana was a London art dealer. Tiffany was married to a Dutch architect. Natalia had brought her dreamboat daughter Yula, 21, who is studying structural interior design.

These were not fash-bash airheads. They were more like a new European tribe of tall, beautiful, intelligent women, to design for whom would be a challenging but cool thing for Ozwald to do next. The LVMH bosses must have been impressed. It's not every designer who can show off his current masculine obsessions and, on the same day, display the perfect audience for his future ambitions.