London has a unique way of throwing curve balls every season. For one, anti-fur vigilantes had a quiet week, what with London ensconced in warm coital bliss (in September!); global warming, I suppose, kept those luxe furs imprisoned. Jonathan 'King of Print' Saunders didn't do much print. Basso & Brooke went off the Street and turned sophisticatedly Deco. Kate Moss (who fronts 14 major advertising campaigns worth 50 million pounds) aligned her super-chic worthiness with super high street brand Topshop to design a capsule collection. At the Biba show, Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan sulked and pursed their lips like spoilt kids. Christopher Kane and Marios Schwab are the hotly christened New-New. Giorgio Armani blew more than a million pounds on the mega party of the week. He also supported Bono and his Red Charity that seeks to wipe out AIDS in Africa. The hottest topic, of course, in this 10 billion pound clothing and textile industry was - skinny models. To which a newspaper snorted back: 'Campaigning to ban twig-like models from London Fashion Week is as logical as banning Keira Knightly from the big screen because big nosed, buck-toothed, spotty girls might feel bad they don't look like her'. Touché.

'Sinful latex beds with celibate cotton' announced the label Noir as it kicked off the first show of the week with Cotton Couture, a wonderful effort at 'fashion with a conscience'. As sharp suits juxtaposed with floating dresses hit the ramp, the buzzword generated by this Danish label was - eco-fashion. Encouraging people to purchase clothing that supports sustainable business processes in the Third World, the message was clear - consume responsibly. You don't want to be caught wearing a super-luxe handcrafted skirt that required an entire village of artisans in the Third World, to go sleepless and underpaid for a week or more, just so you can flaunt it in the Summer of '07. In short, it's important to ask the provenance of your clothes. Else you may not be able to sew back what you heap.

Then arrived Tom Ford. In immaculate form, he stepped in as one of the judges at the Fashion Fringe competition along with Nick Knight, Chloe's Phoebe Philo and Hamish Bowles among others but do you think anyone cared! The collective gaze rested lasciviously on Tom Ford. He looked sexy, in that old Gucci kinda way - suave, tanned, 'and Botoxed?' some speculated. Held in equally slick environs of the City Hall overlooking London Bridge, the Fashion Fringe competition, aimed at finding new talent and bringing zing back to LFW and had young designers turning out quite sophisticated lines. The winner, Gavin Douglas, took the booty home - a £100,000 grant and an exclusive designing contract for Yoox.com who sell women and men's designer clothing and have more than two million visitors each month. His collection, not particularly the crowd favourite, was interesting in the way it addressed Black Victorians, an offshoot of an exhibition he saw at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

And of course, where there is eco-fashion, there is also, poking its twisted head from the wing, adrenalin fashion, a style caught somewhere between imminent death and eternal life. Reminiscent of Jun Takahashi's leather gagged faces from his last collection, Gareth Pugh threw caution (and wearability) to the winds and paraded models in monstrous black checkered uniforms that looked like a cross between Darth Vader and knights of a psychotic Gothic cult. It really was fashion turned inside out, an exaggerated and dark take on Westwoodian aesthetics that saw fashion, the plaything of vanity, become the monster that consumes with its sheer absurdity. This conceptual show did more for the dynamism of London fashion than say, several of the PYT designers that the Chelsea girls love to chase with their bubbly. Adding to this drama were several hidden cameras that recorded the audience as they settled in for the show. This film will be part of a series that will be part of Pugh's Fash-Off project that brings experimental fashion films to the fore. It was all beautifully weird. The predator became prey, the spectator, the spectacle!