THE glass clock at the end of the glimmering silver runway was Hussein Chalayan's symbol of what this astonishing collection meant. A traverse through time and conceptions of dress, his spring/summer offering was a comment on the non-stop consumption of fast fashion, the cult of vintage and the feats of modern technology. It took the team behind the hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to carry of this wondrous piece of fashion theatre that saw clothes unfold, peal away and drop from the body. A Victorian gown with a tattered touch of Miss Havisham about it unsheathed - without the model lifting a finger - a 1920s drop-waisted dress in a collage of beads, mechanical strips of glass sheeting rose up of their own accord and disappeared into a model's saucer hat... by this point every fashion journalist in the room stopped trying to articulate "trends" or "high-waisted versus low" and sat aghast. It was one of those moments.
But what of clothes that a woman can actually wear? Chalayan ticked those boxes, too, with striking organza dresses panelled and layered with precision graphic blocks and faintly Picasso-esque lines mapping out the body. Complex, confrontational and utterly mind-boggling in terms of technical achievement, not just in the robotics but in the cut and dash of the fabric.