London Fashion Week showing shift in landscape

So Somerset House is a playground of energy and colour as London Fashion Week hits half way point. Amongst all the revelry, street style parading and live screenings outside the main venue, new trends are already surfacing.

The early style forecast from London fashion week is crisp and cool. After the riotous explosions of print and colour that have characterised British fashion in recent years, the prevailing wind shows signs of a change of direction. Minimalism and workwear, Carrara marble and white paper: the references are beginning to fall around a theme.

Whilst dungarees are poised for their first comeback, since the days of acid house. Shirtdresses in milky white or pyjama blue are being shown on the catwalk with that catchphrase of 90s glamour, the "no makeup makeup" look. Topshop, Sunday morning’s big attraction, epitomised this shift to free style, no catwalk copying attitude. Topshop Unique, a premium offering from the high street giant, is now one of the most important shows on the London fashion week schedule. And London Fashion Week itself is now reaching an audience many times bigger than was conceived of a decade ago. The reach of the internet has combined with an explosion of interest in fashion to give the catwalk new levels of mass exposure. The livestream of the Topshop show was watched by two million people in 100 countries.

And beyond the accessibility of the show, the bigger picture is the power the high street now has, in an extreme turn around from yesteryear, where high street stores were snubbed as only filtering down a minutiae of what was actually happening on the catwalk. Now, these big brand high street powerhouses are setting their own status and leading the way as Topshop is an integral sponsor of young designer platforms, such as NewGen, which is a base to support tomorrow’s Christopher Kane, Erdem, Jonathan Saunders. And with a continued roll call of designer and high street collaborations to keep consumers in the mix, the high street doesn’t look to be letting go of it’s new found place in fashion any time soon.