The fashion industry loves to moan. Sometimes it even has justification.There are definitely — to take up one of its favourite gripes — too many fashion shows and too little correlation between what sallies down the catwalk and is hyped to death, and what ends up in the shops. Clothes arrive in store at crazy times, dislocated from all reason. Winter coats land in July. Bikinis sell out in June. Something needs to be done.

As is so often the case in fashion, while the industry wrings its hands in noisy helplessness, the system is reforming, more or less of its own accord. “Pre-collections”, which sail into harbour roughly halfway between deliveries of the so -called main or catwalk collections, ie in November and May, now account for 60 per cent to 80 per cent of a designer’s ready-to-wear turnover.

Often pre-collections aren’t shown on a catwalk. Journalists and stylists make individual appointments to see the clothes presented on a rail, or occasionally, on a house model. So in between watching les grands spectacles of couture in Paris last week, I nipped into studios around town to see the pre-collections. It’s certainly a more intimate experience than a show; one where quality of workmanship can be seen up close. But, more importantly, it mitigates the kind of pyrotechnics that, some critics say, have turned the catwalk into little more than a marketing extravaganza and encouraged designers to make increasingly unwearable statements.

The delivery timings of pre-collections — essentially mid-season — mean that they tend to feature the kind of clothes that work pretty much 12 months out of 12, especially in the British climate. Case in point: for his debut pre-collection, Christopher Kane has designed fabulous navy leather jackets with zip-off leather peplums and sleeves for maximum versatility, a new imprint of T-shirt dresses with a digitalised mushroom-cloud print that echoes the sell-out gorilla prints of his main collection, and a distilled (read: more affordable) version of the ribbon-band dresses that appeared on the catwalk for his winter collection. Note that term “T-shirt dress” — it’s a savvy, price-sensitive response from designers who know that they need to expand their customer bases to survive.

“Clever designers,” points out Bridget Cosgrove, the buying and fashion director at Matches, “dovetail their precollections to slot in and work with their main collections.”

In his pre-collection, Jonathan Saunders focused on colourful, sleeveless, fitted shift dresses that many women are now wearing all year round. He took the opportunity to launch a very luxurious (read: expensive) and desirable collection of block-coloured, silk-cashmere-wool knitwear.

Roksanda Ilincic has, along with her fellow British-based designers Markus Lupfer, Richard Nicoll and Giles Deacon, also got in on the act for the first time. Ilincic has clearly put thought into this, working hard to produce the dramatic silhouettes that she’s rapidly becoming known for, but in daytime looks that will sell for two thirds of what her main collection costs.

Not that pre-collections are anodyne. “Sometimes,” Averyl Oates, buying director at Harvey Nichols, points out, “they’re actually a precursor of what’s coming in the catwalk collections, but in a gentler, more accessible form.”

Different designers, different approaches. Richard Nicoll is using his recently launched pre-collection line to refine popular styles from his catwalk collections, reproducing this summer’s popular and widely copied fuchsia and orange panelled silk dresses into more muted charcoal and fawn versions.

For Nicoll, pre-collections offer a chance to free himself up creatively in his catwalk collections. As he notes: “If pre-collection becomes the meat and potatoes of the business, then the catwalk can become more conceptual.” In other words, as couture continues to decline as a viable means of expression for designers, perhaps ready-to-wear catwalk shows will step into the breach, and pre-collection will become what ready-to-wear started out as in the 1960s: accessible high fashion.

It’s encouraging, for those who care about these things, to see so many of the current crop of British designers hitching on to to this train. For years, pre-collections were an American phenomenon — a way for US retailers to “refresh” their rail stock with entirely new collections every three months.

But, as Marigay McKee, head of fashion and beauty at Harrods, says: “These days it’s more or less essential to step on the pre-collection bandwagon if designers want to compete with all the other labels offering early deliveries and newness when it’s needed. Those who don’t offer pre-collections have a very short full-price selling period on the floor before things go into the sale.”

With pre-collections the bread-and-butter of so many designers, the language of engagement doesn’t make much sense. “Main” collections account for between 20 per cent and 40 cent of turnover, so they’re “main” only in terms of being the ones that grab the headlines . And, just to obfuscate a little further, Americans call the November pre-collections Resort or Cruise, a nod to the days when customers migrated to Palm Beach or on to the nearest five-star ocean liner each winter. Confusing, of course, but then, that’s fashion. The salient point is that increasingly these are the clothes that we want to wear.

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