New York Fashion Week Opens

New York Fashion Week opened the latest round of international catwalk shows at the weekend with the focus on the smallest item of clothing in a girl’s wardrobe – a bikini.

By any stretch of the imagination this was an exercise in fashion mathematics as designers exploited the potential of three tiny triangles of fabric to the nth degree.

Bikinis were inspired by everything from spiders’ webs to guerrilla warfare. They came decorated with Swarovski crystals and $150,000 worth of 18 carat gold. They were disguised as Victorian underwear in a froth of lace and broderie anglaise, wrapped around the body like a bondage-bandage or subjected to ruthless cut-and-slash details which, if nothing else, would ensure some very interesting tan-lines.

The designer, Gideon Oberson took inspiration from Latin America in his collection for Gottex, showing colourful, fruit-patterned bikinis with flounced armlets and matching samba skirts, cut to the thigh in front and cascading in ruffles around the back of the legs.

Bandeau and halter-neck styles in rainbow-graphics came with co-ordinated cloaks, tethered to the arms with rows of bangles. Skintight two-pieces were fashioned from alternating bands of transparent and opaque fluorescent mesh and embellished with gilt studs.

Oberson also re-invented the classic black swimsuit, furnishing it with a spider’s web of straps or reducing it to a few strategically-positioned flowers which ensured maximum exposure with minimum coverage. His finale was a “Goldfinger” bikini, featuring a bra and microscopic loin-cloth skirt made from over 5,000 pieces of hand-crafted mini banana leaves in 18 carat gold.

At the Brazilian label, Rosa Cha, the designer Amir Slama ignored his country’s renowned ‘thong’ bikini, in favour of styles which provided a little more rear-coverage than a piece of dental floss.

The bedroom provided inspiration for a series of boudoir-bikinis in ruffled lace and stretch cotton, dyed in tea to give a retro, Victoriana look and accessorised with matching wrap-around mini skirts and baby-doll cover-ups, while guerrilla warfare gave rise to bandolero-bikinis, decorated with cartridge belts and blank bullets embellished with crystals.

The British supermodel, Naomi Campbell, with newly-blonded hair, made a brief appearance in a striking, cutaway one-piece, hand-crocheted in multi-coloured flowers.

New York Fashion Week also paid tribute to the designer, Tommy Hilfiger, who celebrated his 20th anniversary with a bland, if wearable collection of all-American casual separates in red, white, blue and khaki.

The New York collections, which continue until Friday, mark the start of the spring/summer 2006 catwalk season and will be followed by London Fashion Week which opens this weekend at the Natural History Museum in London.

hilary.alexander@telegraph.co.uk