Similarly with pink, shorter-length trousers and longer-length skirts, which have taken two years to make it from the catwalk to the shops. She reads Elle, likes going out and wears a lot of black, and animal prints (60 per cent of clothes sold from Morgan are black, 30 per cent are animal prints). Colour scares her.When grey came in last year, she didn’t take to it straight away. “We see the show and then we have to think about how it will to work on the Morgan Girl,” says Debbie Winstanley, Morgan’s buying director for the United Kingdom and Ireland.Winstanley has intimate knowledge of the Morgan Girl: she likes to be in fashion, is aged between 20 and 30 and works because she wants to be independent, although she probably has a man in her life. Instead, they will be adapted to appeal to as many women as possible. Beading, prints, delicate abstract embroideries, crochet and lacework were also in abundance on sexy, figure- hugging dresses and skimpy tops.The assembled journalists and Morgan executives nodded approvingly and Jocelyn Bismouth, part-owner and chief creative designer, who has designed the collection since 1972, when she was 18, cried as she accepted the congratulations.But, come September, very few of the clothes seen on the catwalk will make it into Morgan’s shops.

Trousers were boyish, with no front pleats, and figure-hugging yet slouchy. It showed its autumn/winter ‘98 collection on the catwalk alongside the key trendsetters.
What Morgan showed was a good representation of what is happening in fashion on street level (ie: a couple of seasons behind the catwalk), something most avid fashion-watchers could pin-point – and all done in “cheap” fabrics.There were the key skirt shapes – the knee-length dirndl (in microfibre), the fan-pleated umbrella (in fake leather), tutus (in wool/acrylic), wraps, and split pencil skirts (in nylon). It is widely assumed that the high street waits for the international catwalk shows to take place and then faithfully picks the key trends, waters them down, and serves them to their customer at an affordable price Not Morgan. It was for Morgan, the sexy, French, high-street chain that’s big over here – an opportunity not to be missed.

AMONG the sack-load of show invitations that landed at our lodgings during Paris fashion week, one stood out like a sore thumb. An evening you’d want to recommend, though more for the quality of the acting than the play.. Even Daisy’s eventual argument against the sale (that it would rob Tom of the uncertainty necessary for creation) seems a bald and weak piece of reasoning rather than an emotionally nuanced response to their fact. The result still feels improbable, as do her dreadfully stagy set-piece speeches about (and at) her semi-retired cocktail pianist husband (John Woodvine) a compulsive petty pilferer. Ryanair has announced six new routes from Stansted this summer, including three to Italy. Although Ryanair appears indifferent to BA’s new airline, it will face tough competition.