Donna Karan
Donna Karan is 60 years old this year. DKNY, her diffusion label, is 20. New York City is (about) 400. That's two and a half significant milestones, but the New York City one is worth noting because it's such an integral part of Donna Karan's branding. It's there in the name and it was there in her show, in a short film that read like a love letter to Manhattan (this isn't really about Queen's or Staten Island). It was even in some of the colours.

This was a cute collection of items that fashion editors tend to call youthful or streetwise. Lengths were mini, shoes were high-heeled baseball boots, colours were zesty (cobalt, taxi-cab yellow, slices of salmon pink) and shapes were va-va-voom up top (strappy bustiers that once looked so outré but now pass for a fresh way to wear a smartish dress for the office, such is the way fashion shifts our sexual parameters). Skirts were the by-now ubiquitous tulip shape. Into all this body-consciousness (recently made fashionable by Christopher Kane, Marios Schwab and Preen) crept the occasional rectangular shift dress with kimono sleeves and baggy boiler suits. Once upon a time, the youthful and streetwise would have pulled this look together from Oxfam and Topshop and eschewed the little matching cardigans. But this is for the time poor - and for anyone who believes youthfulness should be accessible to all. To prove the point, Karan appeared at the end in one of her own white boiler suits. And she looked fabulous.

Diana Von Furstenberg

What's in the water here (apart from a monumental amount of chemicals)? Diane Von Furstenberg is another designer in her seventh decade who looks terrific. And no, that's not code for major amounts of surgery; if she's had any, it's of the superior, subtle variety.

It's easy to underestimate DVF, a brand so commercially successful as to be ubiquitous and, for a while, synonymous with one particular item. But the wrap dress is long behind her, even if it's still a staple in her shops. There was a score of pretty alternatives in this collection - from ruched speckle printed chiffon peasant dress to full-on psychedelic smocks, inspired perhaps, by New York's smash hit of the summer: the Shakespeare in the Park production of the musical Hair.

Not everything was a winner. Some overwrought styling meant an overkill of Peaches-style headbands, and the bronze satin catsuit may have been a moment of madness. Still, DVF's self-confidence and belief that you can wear anything at any age if you have the confidence and style is hard to resist, especially when she takes some of fashion's scarier predilections - harem pants, lace kaftans and gold - and turns them into something that, if not exactly destined for every wardrobe, at least becomes worthy of serious consideration - which, when all is said and done, is what designers are there for.

Preen
It's been a year since the British duo Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi moved their show from London to New York Fashion Week, and it's interesting to see how well they've learnt to speak American. They should have had a head start, what with their natural aesthetic having always been so slick and sophisticated, even when they were showing in London's grungy East End. Sure enough, the show opened promisingly with airy, zippered silk dresses in denim blue that billowed around the body sexily rather than shapelessly and oozed that deceptive simplicity that hip, wealthy Manhattanites appreciate when dressing for a summer of endless 86F days. The drainpipe jodhpurs (a hybrid of two impossible trends unless you have a knockout body, at which point they look miraculous) in perforated suede were pretty special, too, especially partnered with those slouchy silk vests.

Less successful were the body-conscious dresses with sheer panels and curlicues of fabric across the breasts - accomplished, but all too familiar.

Elsewhere, the cappuccino ruffles, lacing and petal folds suggested that the designers were struggling with the syntax of American sportswear. Hard to imagine that new Stateside It girl du jour, Peaches Geldof, who is attending NYU (and, by the looks of things, fashion shows) for the next three years wearing that lot. A tangle of fussy constructions towards the end looked more like pidgin Valentino.

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