London Fashion Week Morning Report, Day 3

On the Runway Blog: London Fashion Week Morning Report, Day 3


Stella McCartney at the Hunter show.Credit Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Not for nothing has this city significantly improved its coffee offerings. The fashion shows Sunday begin at a brisk, penitent 9 a.m. with Preen by Thornton Bregazzi (not one guy, but the surnames of a married couple who began their business in a Portobello Road boutique, Biba-style). That’s regardless of what fringe-tangling debaucheries might have occurred at the Marchesa after-party last night. Fortunately, a pallid, bleary and unshowered look is perfectly O.K. in London; indeed, one might argue it confers a certain intellectual credibility.

NEW YORK FASHION WEEK

Coverage from in and around the New York shows.

This Margaret Howell, a designer from Surrey known for crisp, natty-professor clothes, as well as a “perfect” T-shirt costing 70 pounds, or $114, has plenty of. Her 10 a.m. presentation is at Rambert, the home of Britain’s national dance company, done in conjunction with Open-City, a charity that supports a popular free architectural festival later this month. (What all these esteemed cultural institutions, like the Royal Opera House, think of being taken hostage by flashy fashion is a topic for another time.)

The J.W. Anderson show on Saturday at Central Saint Martins, meanwhile, was fast, furious and maybe a little nose-thumbing; he was rejected from the college years ago. But the men of Sunday’s lunch hour are all alumni: Richard Nicoll at 11, to be followed by Marios Schwab at noon, and the more seasoned Matthew Williamson, also an alumnus of Pucci, at 1 p.m. Bring notebook and sharpened No. 2 and see if you can detect an institutional imprimatur on their collections.

Appropriately at teatime, two quintessentially if diametrically opposed British designers: Paul Smith, prince of the preps (4 p.m.); and an hour later the Red Label of Vivienne Westwood, high priestess of the punks.

And vying for attendees after the official close of the workday will be Stella McCartney, bouncing back from the front row of her husband Alasdhair Willis’s collection for Hunter Original to present a so-called Green Carpet Collection with Livia Firth, wife of the actor Colin Firth and an ecological activist, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. She’ll go up against Pringle of Scotland, long known for the most luscious and moth-baiting of vintage cashmere sweaters, and continuing its efforts to ever-so-gently nudge the brand into the 21st century, over at Claridge’s.

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