1. GARDEM

The Lebanese-born, Paris-based designer Garen Demerdjian has created a label that became the sleeper hit of London Fashion Week. He uses delicate fabrics — washed leather, soft felt and yards of jersey in subdued shades — but forces them into rigidly lean tailoring. His love of sporadic flashes of silver beading keeps a sense of the unexpected.

2. SINHA-STANIC

Last season the St Martins-trained, girlfriend-and-boyfriend duo of Fiona Sinha and Aleksander Stanic came second at Fashion Fringe, London’s fashion talent contest. This time many critics, including the Times fashion team, named theirs one of their favourite shows. They also recently signed a deal with Aeffe, distributors of Jean Paul Gaultier and Moschino. Their autumn/winter collection had an elegant insouciance more often seen in Paris than in London, with delicate draping, muted shades and flashes of bright detail (sequin panelling, for example) that were teasing yet controlled.

3. SARI GUERON

Gueron worked under John Galliano and Oscar de la Renta before branching out alone because she sensed a sizeable void in the market for beautiful, affordable dresses that could be worn at breakfast as easily as they could to a bar. She isn’t afraid of complexity — for a plain shift dress, for instance, she might use lace, cashmere, silk and wool.

4. OLANIC

The appeal of Olanic is its sultry but subtle sexiness. Yes, there are slashed jersey dresses that skim the navel, but there are also narrow tailored trousers and cropped, nipped-in jackets. Niki Taylor, the designer behind the label, trained at the Scottish College of Textiles and was chosen to exhibit at the official London Fashion Week On/Off exhibition last month. Taylor revels in combining fabrics and fashions of days gone by in surprising but winning combinations: some very Eighties metallic trousers with pretty Twenties knit blouses, for instance.

5. SACAI

It’s no wonder that Sacai is such a promising new knitwear label, given the designer Abe Chitose’s training — she put in ten years at Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe. Her solo collection is a coolly chic range of knitwear based upon a very basic palette, ramped up with interesting details — she takes a simple brown or ivory wool base and enhances it with glitter-flecked thread and a whimsical tulle waist-tie, or transforms an unelaborated black wrap cardigan into a refined tuxedo jacket by piping it with satin.

6. VINCE

You should know where you are with a brand when it describes its muse as a “First-Class-travelling, gourmet-food-eating, diamond-encrusted American”. Three years ago, Christopher LaPolice and Rea Laccone noticed that Park Avenue princesses and West Coast starlets — though satisfied in most parts of their lives — lacked the perfect cashmere V-neck. They decided to form Vince and become the pioneers and purveyors of “luxe casual”, as they like to call it, based on that V-neck. Since hearing many sighs of satisfaction, Vince has broadened its repertoire of faultless basics to include twill trousers and cotton T-shirts.

7. THAKOON

All the time Thakoon Panichgul was writing about the work of others while a fashion journalist at Harper’s Bazaar, he harboured design ambitions of his own. Last April he put his plans into action with a 14-piece collection presented to much applause during New York Fashion Week. With his slim shifts and elegant tailoring — including the perfect silk and cotton cropped jacket — he shows a yearning for the classics. But the designer, born in Thailand and raised in Ohio, extends his creativity beyond mere reproduction: he twists lace, uses splashy prints freely and has even replaced cashmere with a material made entirely of bamboo fibres, which is amazingly warm but so lightweight it drapes like silk.

8. RÜTZOU

Susanne Rützou launched her own womenswear range in 2000 after a long stint at the Danish label Bruuns Bazaar. Her collection mixes craftwork with clean Scandinavian lines: the result is rich floral prints splashed over soft silk blouses, and intricate, vibrant embroidery on featherweight skirts and cotton tops.

9. BAUM und PFERDGARTEN

The icy freshness of this Danish label’s spring collection makes it a brand to watch. The style is simultaneously austere and sweet — high-necked blouses with masculine-checked coats — and cleverly combines ideas that should be incongruous but aren’t. Its summer collection is all about the power of the dress — silk or cotton, plain or polka-dotted, serene or playful, Baum has them all.

10. LIBERTINE

When both designers moonlight as musicians — Johnson Hartig sings for the rock group Model Citizen while Cindy Greene fronts the dance group Fischerspooner — the clothes are probably going to have stories to tell. Libertine is a company split in two. It is based in both LA and New York, and its design process is also bi-coastal. First Hartig, who lives in California, hunts for suitable used clothes to deconstruct: his favourite pastime is messing around with bleach and scissors. The remnants then fly to New York, where Greene sticks the pieces together with elaborately printed 19th-century silk and heat transfers. It is this sometimes-shared, sometimes-contrasting vision that gives Libertine clothes their cultish effect.

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