London Fashion Week, which takes place twice a year in February and September, is the major national showcase for the country’s hottest designers. Strongly supported by the Department for Trade and Industry, it is the focus of a concerted effort to bring new design talent into the clothing and textile industries.

The turning-point in the success story of British fashion was the 1960s, the first era of Mary Quant, Biba and Jean Muir – and of course the miniskirt. Its close association with the British pop scene was what ensured that British fashion design became known the world over.

The Punk movement

By the late 1970s, the fashion industry was becoming marginalised in favour of styles that were generated from the streets. The punk movement, with its do-it-yourself ethos, rejected the clothes that the chain-stores sold, replacing them with remodelled jumble sale and charity shop clothing, usually deliberately distressed. Zandra Rhodes was one designer who tried to imitate this look for the couture market, with carefully torn and jewel-encrusted dresses, a move that was held in contempt on the punk scene.

The designer who benefited most of all from punk was Vivienne Westwood, who had set up shop on the King’s Road, Chelsea, with Malcolm McLaren, later to become manager of the Sex Pistols. Westwood’s clothes emphasised rebellion and shock, featuring T-shirts with explicit sexual images on the front, as well as clothing inspired directly by sado-masochistic sexual tastes.

It was only in the aftermath of Punk, during the New Romantic period in music and fashion, that Westwood began to consider herself a designer. A show with the theme of Pirates, presented at Olympia in March 1981, was her first catwalk show. Since then, Westwood has gone from strength to strength, her designs always retaining a confrontational element. Who could forget Naomi Campbell tottering and collapsing off Westwood’s sky-high platform shoes on the Paris catwalk in 1993?

Into the Eighties

The 1980s marked another important turning point, when the taste for designer wear really took hold outside its usual audience of the super-rich. After the success of the New Romantic movement at the beginning of the decade, fashion reoriented itself in the direction of understated refinement.

Paul Smith was the big name in menswear, his exquisitely tailored suits and woollens at often surprisingly affordable prices becoming the first choice of the stylish urban male. Knighted in 2000, Sir Paul has become a major international force, showing a couture range for the first time ever in China in April 2006.

The high profile of British fashion internationally was maintained in the Eighties by Diana, Princess of Wales, who regularly wore creations by designers such as Belville Sassoon, Catherine Walker, Victor Edelstein and Bruce Oldfield to official engagements.

The return of vintage

Since the late 1990s, there has been a movement in the world of high fashion back towards classic or "vintage" looks. Russell Sage is one who pioneered this trend, with smart leatherwear, Art Deco prints and – most controversially – real fur.

To many people, the haute couture world can look very silly. The standard response when we see a model walking along the catwalk in a suit made of wood (by Yohji Yamamoto in 1991), or Russell Sage’s dress made out of £10,000-worth of £50 notes, is to ask who in the real world would want to wear such bizarre creations. And yet the designer fashion industry does have an influence on the real world. It only takes one supermodel to be seen looking drop-dead gorgeous on arrival at a film premiere for the chain-store clothing industry to pick up on the look and imitate it at an affordable price.

Outside the world of designer fashion, the brands that have the biggest impact on what we wear today are the sports labels. At some stage within the last 30 years, the big sportswear manufacturers – Adidas, Nike, Reebok, Lacoste, etc. – branched out from supplying the world with running shoes and football boots, and began to dress us for every occasion, from the nightclub to the office to slouching round the supermarket. Even here though, the influence of designers has not been missing, as is seen in Yamamoto’s niche footwear range for Adidas.