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!

If Gareth Pugh brought out the dark side of fashion, Manish Arora went ahead and conjured a magical flora-fauna paradise. His models were 'gagged' too, only in the way of pretty flowers that were in place of mouths, eyes that metamorphosed into luscious butterflies and nets that shielded the eyes in mysterious hues. His make-up artist, Kabuki, an exceptionally talented New Yorker did for Manish's collection what good old wasabi does for a fine platter of sushi - adds a kick that lingers on your palate! Manish's collection, in lime, sky blue and emerald greens came in puffballs, empire lines and cigarette pants amongst others, making it quirky as ever but quite mature and wearable. The word going around was that he's now truly 'into Londonhood, not Bollywood'!

Further away, at the Tate Modern, the city welcomed the most exquisite art exhibition of the Russian master, Kandinsky. Titled Passage to Abstraction, it was a visual journey of his creative tour de force that eventually made him the master of Abstraction. The title seemed quite becoming at the time because back in the Tents, if you noticed the Indian designers' 'path to integration' (as Anna Orsini, the head of International Designers at the British Fashion Council likes to call it) you would have been pleasantly surprised. In fact, even designers like Ashish Soni, Rajesh Pratap Singh, Ana Mika and Sabyasachi Mukherjee who put up stalls (not shows) at the exhibition, have become exemplary in the way they have integrated into 'Londonhood'. Ethnicity has become irrelevant, only design really matters.

And as they say around here, you can take the London out of the street but you can't take the street out of London. And one place where street-chic is always in abundance is Fashion East. This show excites everyone. It's an edgy creative laboratory that supports and promotes new creative talent, their luminary alumni have been designers like Jonathan Saunders and Gareth Pugh.

This year too, three designers qualified to present a group show. Louise Goldin showcased intricately cut out and web-like shields on fitted 'swimwear' dresses (manufactured in Brazil) while Meadham Kirchhoff`s 'I'm not interested in cute clothes' statement was exemplified in his louche feminine but sporty silhouettes in silks, nylons and jerseys. Danielle Scutt`s 'clothes you can have a fight in' were indeed quite deadly with a bloody red dress that came with a super-size pussy bow.

However, the label that did steer very clear from its legacy of urban jungle chic and kitsch prints was Basso & Brooke, one of the hottest tickets of the week. Invoking the muses and drawing inspiration from Surrealism, Cubism and Orientalism, their collection was for the cultural meanderers of the world. 'From casinos on the Côte d'Azur to the verandahs of a Celyonese tea plantation, this is a collection with more passport stamps than a diplomat' read the programme note. Replete with flapper dresses with Deco tassels in Swarovski, warp dresses in rich oriental colours, the collection was vibrant, dramatic (it was staged in a movie theatre) and 'commercially viable' noted a Japanese buyer next to me. While this Brazilian-English duo's guttural bravado and boisterous creativity of their past collections (the finale piece of their Autumn/Winter 2005-2006 collection was recently acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for their permanent collection) was sorely missed, this collection had its own impact, albeit a more sophisticated one.

Back at the Tents, there were serious fashion reinventions taking place with the old vanguards of Brit style - Biba, Boy George and Zandra Rhodes. Boy George, a bit rotund but affable, brought his B-Rude collection to the ramp - an archaic rendition of street-sport cool that saw corset tops with glitter-bug graffiti and bubblegum pink tracksuits that have outlived their time. Zandra Rhodes' show after many years was an unapologetic colour fest. No one complained. Her blasé take on her hey days of the '60s saw hemlines in controlled disarray, printed kaftan-catsuit combos, fitted Indian tunics with second skin leggings (she has always been inspired by India) which flooded the ramp with nostalgia, colour and naïve Brit eccentricity. In fact, it made the legendary Biba label at its relaunch look like a damp squib. Almost colourless and printless, it was but a vapid interpretation of Biba's cult status in the Swinging Sixties.

But the one who stole everyone's sigh one afternoon was the Turkish designer, Bora Aksu. His 'untouchable' collection was a collaboration with two unassuming accomplices - a dance company, Cathy Parston Project and Converse - the everyday icon of our soles! He converted 400 pairs of Converse All-Star shoes into Grecian type sportswear, if ever a combination like that existed. The Converse rubber soles were turned into waistcoats, breastplates and harnesses, worn over chiffon dresses while the shoelaces transformed into stunning corseted lurex knits. Bora Aksu had fun with the fashion variables - couture mixed with sportswear, jersey with silks in colours of sand, slate and surf. This was undoubtedly one ingenious fait accompli indeed!

London Fashion Week has become a microcosm of the London way of life. The designers are as varied, socially, culturally and economically as the many layers of this nation city. When Samuel Johnson said, 'By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show', he had no idea that this one week in the calendar could very well have been the shortest route to experiencing it!