London Fashion Week: The shows must go on

In the shadow of last week's atrocities, striking the right note at London Fashion Week was never going to be easy, especially for an industry not noted for its tact or wider moral perspective

It's the Jasper Conran show, the highlight of opening day at London Fashion Week. Inside a large white tent, crouched before the noble gothic pile of London's Natural History Museum, the cream of metropolitan fashion writers gaze at the catwalk, while the elongated circles of light from the twirling mirror-balls crawl across their poised spiral notebooks.

Up and down in front of them, processing at a fast militiaman stride (only with perhaps more of a roll to the hips) are fifteen girls of unearthly slenderness and hauteur. They slink and sashay and saunter to the end of the runway, then stand, with head thrown back and hand on hip just so, and stare at the cameras.

What they've so calmly walked into is a whole army of snappers: newspaper and magazine staff photographers, international paparazzi. I counted a hundred fat, telephoto lenses ranged on six levels – a frightening concentration of flashbulb firepower. How can they do it again and again, the girls who walk into that onslaught of testosterone, sweat and clacking shutters? Suddenly their lifted faces and jutting chins seemed like attitudes of professional defiance.

The fashion world has a lot to feel defiant about. One is fate, or luck or bad timing, whatever caprice of fortune dictated that the world's worst-ever terrorist atrocity coincided with New York Fashion Week. From a purely fashion-industry perspective, the closing-down of Manhattan was disastrous, leaving mounds of clothes and hordes of expensive stylists and models stranded in the smouldering Big Apple.

But at the same time, from all over the fashion industry, the crucial question has been raised: Is it morally justifiable to go ahead and present 50-odd catwalk shows in London, at a time when nearly 6,000 New York citizens had perished in flames and crashing buildings, and the world now stands on the brink of a holy war? Should they call the whole thing off until a decent period of mourning had intervened?

But that begs the question: why should the fashion trade be considered as different from any other enterprise – the money markets, say, or the double-glazing industry? Would the Confederation of, say, British Estate Agents be so fastidious about public affirmations of how they make their money?

Everyone knows the answer. The fashion industry is perceived as the epitome of something the Los Angeles Times recently dubbed "The Play World" – an arena of frivolity and frou-frou, utterly distinct from "The Real World" where people give emergency blood. The Play World is the world of celebrity magazines, TV soap operas, rock'n'roll PR, gossip columnists, award ceremonies, trivia quizzes and party-watchers. Fashion shows, by this way of thinking, are antithetical to a universe where hijackers turn a passenger jet with 80 people and 20,000 gallons of fuel on board into a one-kiloton flying bomb.

They are the province of useless people, the farcical stage across which Patsy and Edina from Ab Fab totter in their Jimmy Choo slingbacks en route by taxi to Harvey Nichols. Fashion is Kate Moss emerging from the Met Bar, the zone where absurd people like Lady Victoria Hervey and Nicky Haslam gossip with other foolish social butterflies and nobody cares about anything more important than how to get Alexander McQueen to their next party.

When newspapers have a sizeable tragedy to cover (and this has claims to be the biggest story since the outbreak of war in 1939), the Play World is the first thing to go – the gossip stuff, and arts reviews, the humorous column and the pocket cartoon. But does London Fashion Week deserve to be consigned to Trivia Central?

To their credit, the organisers spent days wringing their hands about the best way to proceed. The British Fashion Council, which has organised the week of 52 catwalk shows, 152 exhibitions and a punishing schedule of fashion-house parties, met for crisis talks on Friday with the country's major designers. "Almost all of them wanted to go ahead," said Nicolas Coleridge, the suave, blue-pin-striped boss of Condé Nast UK and chairman of the BFC. "For many of them, their livelihood was at stake. Being at the show makes a huge difference to the fortunes of smaller British designers and they just can't afford to pull out. Six of the bigger designers decided not to show – but they can afford to lose the money, because they'll be appearing in Milan and Paris in the next couple of weeks.

"People may assume fashion is all about frivolity, trivia and froth", continued Coleridge, "but it certainly doesn't seem like that to the people involved. It's the sixth biggest commercial money-spinner in the UK, it gives work to 270,000 people. Worldwide it's worth £18bn every year, and London Fashion Week represent the top 10 per cent of that. Fundamentally this is about business, and it should go ahead on a business footing, just as Paris, Milan and New York are going..."

But are the refuseniks pulling out of the fashion circus for practical or ethical reasons? "Paul Smith does not feel it is appropriate to show his collection within the format of a fashion show so soon after these tragic events," the Nottingham couturier's press office told the world last week, "and whilst there is so much uncertainty about the outcome". And Katharine Hamnett has gone to the lengths of manufacturing instant T-shirts bearing the legend "Women Against War" and "No War", awakening memories of the notorious "58% Don't Want Pershing" T-shirt she wore while meeting Mrs Thatcher during the Greenham Common protests.

Paul Oh, Clements Ribeiro and Burberry have also decided now is not the time to watch lissom models swanning about in front of sun-glassed sophisticates, and won't be showing their Spring/Summer creations. "And we've cancelled all the parties," said Coleridge with a tinge of wistfulness. "Usually there are parties all week. The British Fashion Council was planning one on Friday, hosted by me and 52 designers. We've cancelled it and are giving much of the money we'd have spent to the American Red Cross."

All of which is gall and wormwood to Markus Lupfer, a young German designer based in London for six years, whose elegant frocks can be found in Browns and Harveys Nicks. "I felt very disappointed when I read reports in the Sunday papers saying 'leading designers have pulled out because they think it's inappropriate', as if they were just doing it out of respect," he said. "I was upset. It was as if the rest of us didn't care. The people who pulled out have the financial resources to do it. But the smaller you are, the less you can afford such a gesture. It costs us £30,000 to stage the show, the venue, the lighting, the catwalk, the music, the food, the models. We do it, hoping to make £500,000 in buyers' orders. But you can't afford to lose this money and try and join the Milan or Paris shows. At the end of the day it must be a business decision".

But the political world still intrudes on the commercial. There was a minute's silence yesterday morning for the victims of the Twin Towers attacks. And Jasper Conran was moved to include, at the start of his show, a ringing defence of why he was going ahead with the chiffon and silk and the naked flesh. "The aims and objectives of terrorism are not only to kill and maim but also to disrupt and destroy the fabric and substance of democratic society" he announced, displaying a fine rhetorical flair for the double-epithet. "It is not our intention to allow these people and organisations to prevail by bowing out of what we feel to be our responsibility to fashion and to democracy."

Further along the wall of the Natural –History Museum stands the prefabricated tent where the British Fashion Council has its temporary offices. Standing in the lobby, an extraordinary sight is poking out of the ground – the remains of a fossilised tree trunk, 20-ft high, encased in polythene and a candy-striped bow, as if someone had gift-wrapped the remains of New York's South Tower. Around the walls are Vogue posters advertising Moët et Chandon, and featuring pretty young women in a ditzy sexual frenzy about the small quarter-size champagne splits in their hands. It is about as far away from the world of terror, bombing raids and Afghan diplomacy as you can get – the Play World and the Real World, as divided as East and West.

Then I ran into the legendary Suzy Menkes, the fashion diva of the International Herald Tribune, walking with the aid of a stick after spraining her ankle, and asked what she thinks of Paul Smith and Katharine Hamnett and their principled stand for "appropriateness". "I don't think fashion designers should get involved in making political statements," she said briskly. "The fashion world should carry on just like any other business should. Okay, it seems a bit wrong to have paparazzi-fodder sitting in the front row, and to have parties and froth, but as far as business is concerned, what should you do? Shut down the whole world?"