In a way, it's almost symbolic that, a day after Christie's sold Duchamp’s Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, for $11 million at the sale of the late couturier Yves Saint Laurent's collection, Mary Katrantzou's perfume-inspired collection was showcased at London Fashion Week.
Fashion brands usually conceive perfumes as one of their main and possibly quickest sources of money, yet so far perfume had rarely inspired a proper fashion collection. 
Katrantzou took indeed images of vintage perfume bottles and printed them on her dresses in a style reminiscent of the one she used for her MA show collection that featured trompe l’oeil jewellery dresses.
The colours of the prints were beautifully hyperreal also thanks to those radiantly charming shades of gold, red, emerald green and turquoise.
The prints reminded of different perfume bottles: there were crossovers between Guerlain's Shalimar and Germain Lecomte’s Soir de Fête, with the occasional ziggurat-shaped bottle from Art Deco times.
While the prints perfectly fitted Katrantzou’s shift or tunic dresses with funnel-like necklines or tall necklaces that almost gave the impression they were reproducing the cap of a perfume bottle, the effect on her tops wasn't exactly as beautiful and revealed that Katrantzou still has some work to do to reach perfection in her shapes and silhouettes. 
Yet her floor-length gowns and black evening column dress worn with her signature oversized necklaces proved she might not be too far from it.
Knitwear has been radically revolutionised in the last few years thanks to maverick designers and Mark Fast is definitely one of them.
With the help of elastomeric yarns he has created a predominantly black collection featuring bondage body-con dresses, skirts with soft viscose fringes for aggressively modern flappers and gravity defying mini-dresses fragilely kept together by just a few thin threads.
Rather than hiding the body, like proper knitwear, Fast’s shorter than short designs reveal large portions of skin and, though this is what makes him stand out from other knitwear designers, this is also a weak note when it comes to the saleability of his designs.
Tailored, wearable and saleable were the key points behind Osman Yousefzada’s collection.
The designer’s strength stands in his distinctive tailoring through which he creates streamlined timeless pieces.
His new designs - short dresses, trouser suits with cropped jackets and well-sculpted white shirts - looked superficially simple, though they were actually carefully constructed pieces characterised by relaxed silhouettes that flattered the body rather than constricting it.
The A/W 09 collection - mainly based on sensible colours such as ice, black, charcoal and teal with occasional gold and silver beaded motifs - 
also has a sort of hieratical dimension thanks to long gowns with beaded collars that called to mind religious vestments, though Yousefzada showed he’s found a new strength in his outerwear and in particular in his precisely cut coats. 
Peter Pilotto’s collection had a highly visual value, thanks to some quite strikingly dynamic pixellated blue, red and yellowish prints.
There were naturalistic inspirations behind the mini-dresses with sequinned embroideries that had a mineral-like effect and the outfits with burnt orange and red prints that seemed to reproduce the colours and movement of an erupting volcano, yet at times the silhouettes, even when moulded and sculpted by stylistically interesting drapery motifs, were a bit too repetitive.
Rather than simply looking for inspiration among the Pantone shades and Dulux paint cards, Henry Holland has been meticulously copying them.
In fact, instead of mixing colours, Holland took one shade - green, blue, pink, purple and grey - and developed from there a whole collection that featured designs in graduated shades, interrupted by a white band. The effect was a bit like looking at those boring eye-shadow palettes that, rather than offering variety, offer the same colours in subtle variations.
Silhouettes were mostly square, not only in the shoulders or the jacket shapes, but also in the skirts that featured rows of flaps jutting out, and in the jacket-like waistcoats for men, that, rather than being crossovers between Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero's squarish and colourful designs, were just unnecessarily embarrassing.
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