Raising kane; With shock-bright minidresses and sizzling advance buzz, a Scottish wunderkind blasts off from the London runway.

Byline: Sarah Mower

Christopher Kane is the boy who roared so loud his name reverberated through fashion even before his neon-elastic, lace-frilled, sparkle-zoned body dresses stepped onto the London runway. The sight could have given you whiplash: 33 tiny, singular orange, yellow, lime, raspberry, cobalt, turquoise, and brown dresses, each implanted with fluorescent zippers, nude frill, crystal mesh, and brass rings, then clipped tight with white plastic child-car-seat buckles.

And from whence has this zing-fueled energy arrived? The nineties . . . . and Motherwell, Scotland, it turns out. "Our dad got a satellite dish when we were kids," says Kane, "and I recorded Gianni Versace's couture shows, wi' this woman called Elsa Klensch who looked like something from Star Wars, wi' her bob and mandarin collars. It was that, and watching my big sister, Tammy, going out aged fourteen in her skintight silver Helen Storey bodydress, with rage on the front, in 1991. I was nine."

Acting on a tip-off about Kane's passion for Gianni, Donatella Versace beamed him up to Milan the second he presented his stellar master's-graduate collection in March. After helping on the ...