'Greatest hits? Her only British hit was the notorious "Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus". A duet with her lover Serge Gainsbourg which featured a lot of orgasmic breathing'

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It was African, 18th-century with a little bit of Mozart madness thrown in for good measure. Christian Lacroix, the master of eccentric French dressing, showed an upbeat but disciplined collection yesterday. There were bright mixes of colour, fine woven fabrics, and bright abstract patterns.

A leading charity has criticised one of Britain's most acclaimed young designers for using "crass" imagery of a starving child on his clothes.

In 1966, flower-power was blooming across the hippie world from Haight-Ashbury to the King's Road. In 1996, however, all the flowers seem to have relocated to New Bond Street and points chic. These clothes may feature the sort of thing that normally adorns comfy sofas or the walls of country cottages, but they're definitely not for wallflowers

London Fashion Week brought us gothic grandeur in a ghostly church and modernism as pointed as Mr Spock's ears, says Tamsin Blanchard. Photographs: Peter Macdiarmid

It was rumoured that supermodel Kristen McMenamy was coming to London to appear in the shows of Philip Treacy, Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen. Then an equally furious rumour abounded that she had decided to bypass London and go straight to Milan - leaving the designers without a star model.

How would you interpret this brief: bring to life your interpretation of the exhilaration of liberty? This was the task set by the people who organise the Smirnoff International Fashion Awards. The 15 fashion design students who got through to the British final let rip in a futuristic visual feast last Thursday at a London nightclub. They showed the kind of clothes that take as much imagination to wear as they do to design.

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Fashion: It is impossible to be quiet while wearing red. Whether poppy red or fire-engine red or slick lipstick red, it isn't a colour for wallflowers. Fortunately, the clothes shown here also come in basic black and boring beige

You could tell there was a consensus: Alexander McQueen's debut was a horror show. In between bursts of hard house music, there was an eerie silence where usually motordrives whirr and shutters click. The photographers, many of them veterans of as many war-zones as fashion shows, had nearly all stopped snapping.