Glamour for Everygirl

Tamsin Blanchard examines the lasting magic of the Clothes Show

It is a Girl's World come to life: a non-stop whirlwind of glamorous clothes, makeovers by hair and make-up teams, catwalk shows, bright lights, pulsating music, camera flashes, leggy models and, to top it all, the Cheshire Cat grin of fashion king Jeff Banks. The Clothes Show Live event at Birmingham's NEC started yesterday and by the end of the weekend will have attracted almost 250,000 schoolgirls, their older sisters, their boyfriends and mothers. Dreams come true at Clothes Show Live. There is always the possibility of being scooped from the crowd and on to the world's largest catwalk, alongside superstar models like Jodie Kidd and Marcus Schenkenberg. It's designed to leave all participants on a high.

But behind the glossy lipstick and the shimmering eyeshadow, the Clothes Show Live is big business. For many designers, it is as important as the trade shows held at the same venue twice a year. This weekend the designers get to meet their market and, more importantly, their market gets to meet them. Last year pounds 2,250 was spent every minute and by the end of the six-day period, visitors had parted with pounds 8m.

For many designers, the annual event comes at a perfect time. They have just finished selling their collections for next summer and the event boosts cash flow in the run up to Christmas. In a business that is all about hype and marketing, it is the greatest promotional event of all with a captive market, over half of whom are young women aged 16-25.

The BBC's Clothes Show programme (there is also a highly successful spin-off magazine) is 10 years old next year. It is something of a mystery to the TV executives who can't quite comprehend how the mix of high street bargains, designer frocks, and wedding dresses picks up some eight million viewers - 39 per cent of the audience share on Sunday afternoon.

When Jeff Banks, then running his successful Warehouse chain, and television producer Roger Casstles made the first pilot of the Clothes Show in 1983, it took them three years before it was actually accepted. "No one wanted it," says Banks. "But I was obsessed about getting fashion on television." His status as an industry insider and his slightly camp brand of enthusiasm are both essential to the show's formula.

The first show went out in 1986 and after only three programmes, its success was obvious. "The appeal of the programme is not me, it's not the presenters. It's the insatiable thirst that the public has for the subject," Banks says. It was the first programme to treat fashion in any depth and is still, if not the only, one of a spare handful of nationally networked fashion programmes in the world.

Before the Clothes Show, ordinary people felt intimidated by fashion. Jeff Banks and the other presenters have introduced the public to designers whose clothes most people can never hope to afford. The clothes are made accessible, modelled by real people and catwalk trends are translated for people whose lives do not revolve around hem lines. The show aims to include everyone, from brides (the Bride of the Year competition allows the winner to have a designer wedding) to the brownies (Jeff Banks redesigned their uniforms onscreen). This is fashion at its most basic, grassroots level.

By focusing on the personalities in the industry as much as the clothes, it has become a kind of Top of the Pops, a formula that appeals to everyone (except for the snobbish fashion elite who tend to sneer). Ten years ago, the woman in the street would not have known who John Galliano was. Now, the designer is recognised in the street by autograph hunters. And while the postbags at the Clothes Show's Birmingham office keep on piling up, Jeff Banks's vision has paid off. On the fashion catwalk at the NEC, the music explodes, the models sashay and the crowds roar.