FASHION designers are often accused of creating costumes rather than wearable clothes. At the collections in Paris last month, it was the British designers who ransacked the dressing-up boxes and took historical costume to extremes. The clothes of a Victorian East End street urchin lend themselves perfectly to mixing with modern-day, hard-edged punk. John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood both showed huge, trailing crinolines and bustles. Galliano's collection travelled from the 1800s through to the 1920s, even hinting at the present Queen's coronation dress.

BRIAN PITMAN, the Lloyds Bank chief, is never happier than when ensconced in the gloomy banking parlours of EC2, proudly screening slides of his bank's impressive earnings record. So I was interested to see how he would fare in alien territory, the spotlit terrain of a glitzy fashion show. His bank sponsored the British Fashion Awards last week.

Mark Werts growled down the telephone from Los Angeles. He was talking about jeans: 'The bottom's dropped out. It was a false market created by those wonderful Japanese.' His seven American Rag stores in California sell designer and vintage clothing, shoes and furniture, and prices are tumbling in the vintage denim market.

JOHN ROCHA was last night named British Designer of the Year. Past recipients of the Lloyds Bank Award include Vivienne Westwood and Rifat Ozbek.

'We'll sell it, there's a million ideas there,' said Gene Pressman, chief mandarin of Barney's New York, probably the most important fashion store in the world. Sales to German shops were up 10 times on last year by close of business on Wednesday night.

Our Viv and our John. They make you proud. In Paris this week, Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano - Britons both - proved that fashion has an exciting future, a sizzling change from deconstructivist grey.

'WHILE YOU are over here, you should check out LA. That town's gonna blow,' says the voice from the next cubicle of a New York washroom.

SWATCH mania, the craze for those cheerful watches from Switzerland with the annoyingly loud tick, goes on. Mob scenes are expected at the London Planetarium tonight, when a limited edition Swatch by Vivienne Westwood OBE will go on sale.

A REKINDLED age of elegance is the aim of a one-woman campaign by Vivienne Westwood, who showed at the Paris ready-to-wear collections on Tuesday night.

ONCE punks were the scourge of society. Now they are the subject of exhibitions, lectures, and sociology students' essays.

SUZANNE MIZZI is wearing a tight black strapless dress with a frontal slit almost to the waist, and a pair of - what four-inch? six-inch? - Vivienne Westwood platform shoes, and she's standing on one leg on a slatted wooden chair, the other leg bent at the knee so that it's poking through the slit in her dress. She's holding on to a life-size model of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, half-mangled, with bits of blood and flesh and metal coming out of it. Mizzi is utterly rigid, you wonder how much pain she's in, but she's moving nothing apart from her lips. Mizzi has full, malleable lips, and she's delicately arranging them, pulling them across the borderline between pout and smile, trying them one way and then another, minutely different, still holding her pose, still standing on one leg. This is work that needs precision, expertise, endurance. The lips part, gently, opening, and . . . there] The corners flicker upwards.

TIZER AND PAULINE IN THE KITCHEN

Here they come. Clump, clump, clump. Nothing can stop them. Clump, clump, clump. The horrible shoes.

The Earl of Gowrie, Provost of the Royal College of Art, presided over Convocation on Friday 19 July 1992 at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7. The Pro-Provost and Chairman of the Council, Sir Michael Butler, paid tribute to Mr Jocelyn Stevens and presented him on behalf of the Council with a Medal on the occasion of his retirement as Rector and Vice- Provost.