Front rows speak louder than words. It’s all very well having a bunch of edgy 15-year-olds to model your collection but, if your audience is composed of Ivana Trumps, no one is going to believe it’s cool.

And so to Topshop’s show for its Unique line, on the first day of London Fashion Week. The front row consisted of Pixie Geldof (who has Paula Yates’s blonde crop), Alexa Chung (TV presenter; holey tights), Kelly Osborne (Sharon and Ozzy’s collaboration; sporting Ironic heart-shaped sunglasses) and any number of girls with a — by now de rigueur — brutal 1960s fringe.

It is such a diametrically different approach to the front-row attire usually required to attend New York fashion shows (full cocktail wear) which last week were graced by the usual mêlée of the preternaturally youthful (Demi Moore and Madonna) and the preternaturally groomed (Victoria Beckham). Tad Safran — who created a furore in this newspaper when he suggested that, compared with impeccably glossy Manhattanites, British women looked more like a fungal infection than a female — would have had a field day. But here creativity is expected to look grungy: it always has and always will.

The grunginess is increasingly an affectation, of course, because Topshop is a commercial enterprise. Unique is just one of its ranges and sits at the top end of its output, with prices ranging from £30 to £150, although that’s cheap compared with other collections at London Fashion Week — and rather chic, to judge from this showing.

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• Pictures: Topshop at LFW

Multimedia

• Pictures: London Fashion Week

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Whereas the Unique summer collection is all about cough-and-they’ll-blow-away parachute silk vest dresses and trousers, the winter collection boasted sturdy, felted wools, sliced into rather good-looking brown or black boy-trousers and curvy jackets, which featured some sophisticated curved seams that hugged the body’s contours. It was impressive for the price, assuming that the merchandise looks this good when it hits the stores. Drainpipes remain a constant, but this time in leather and worn very long, over same-coloured platform shoes so that the whole thing looked like a rather depraved all-in-one.

This was the only deviant note. For a collection aimed at the younger end of the market it was surprisingly demure: long smock dresses, oversized sheepskins and calf-length dirndl skirts, which I defy anyone to sex up.

Over at Biba there was more fungus to be observed — namely in the shape of those tiny mushroom- shaped skirts that sprout beneath drop-waisted tops with curved shoulders. It’s all very modish and arresting but also a little familiar, as these silhouettes debuted last season at Balenciaga — and they didn’t look any more wearable then.

Still, as a show, it was slick and fairly accomplished. It was also beautifully styled, as one would expect of Hector Castro, who took over after Bella Freud’s stint with the label. What any of it has to do with the original Biba, known for its printed dresses and jaunty trouser suits, is anyone’s guess. But it wouldn’t be London Fashion Week without unanswerable questions.

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