Graduate Fashion Week: Talented Young Brits with Designs on the World Stage

Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Alberta Ferretti: the names might be foreign but the designers are now likely to be as British as a bowler hat.

Behind the great brands, British fashion graduates are engaged in a covert takeover and the full extent of their advance was in evidence at Graduate Fashion Week.

Student fashion shows are supposed to be the place for fabulous parades of wildly improbable outfits.

But the audience at this year's graduate show, on Wednesday evening in London, saw shockingly wearable clothing.

The £20,000 top prize went to James Lawrence, of the University of Northumbria, for a collection of white jackets, nude knitwear and high-waisted trousers, after four days of shows bringing together 1,000 students from 42 textile and design colleges.

For the first time, representatives from seven fashion headhunting agencies had taken stands at the exhibition.

Barry Nathan, a scout for American labels including Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Gap, was in the audience.

There might be nothing new in finding British designers at the creative helm.

For a decade, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano have been flying the flag in Paris.

But, increasingly, British-trained students are being plucked to work behind the scenes: look carefully and it's the Brits who predominate in design studios all