state of the union; Sarah Mower spotlights the most optimistic, color-crazed collections to come out of London in years.

Byline: Sarah Mower

Sparked by a cadre of both names and newcomers, the London spring shows caught fire in a way that hasn't been witnessed for a decade. They're different from last time. Far from the brooding conceptualist theater of the nineties (London's last flare-up of brilliance), the breakout is flowing through an immensely diverse individualism and a kaleidoscopic rush of color. "I think the color is a translation of all the energy that's in London," says David Saunders, a fine-art-print designer who put together his bright, geometric first women's collection under his David David label this season. "It's a sign of elation and joie de vivre," reckons Duro Olowu, who broke out the flowers and a cache of jewel-inspired pinks, greens, and purples in his chicly put-together second runway show. "What's really great is there's no harking back to 'the last time' anymore. Now people are just really excited about the present."

Henry Holland, along with his childhood mate Agyness Deyn (international runway champ of the season), is one half of the poster couple for the buzzy, collaborative side of the city's fashion happenings. "The thing is, London's got such a friendly atmosphere now," he says. "People are happy to help each other out. There are no 'camps' of this or that designer. When fashion friends come from New York, they can't quite believe it. Everyone lives, works, parties, and goes to the pub in the East End." Holland's cheeky rhyming-slogan T-shirts (cause me pain, hedi slimane and wham, bam, thank you, stam being two of the more reprintable) became a mass-market copycat sensation last year, but, as he cheerfully admits, it was a case of move on up or flop. "My tees had been so ripped off, I'd have been crucified if I'd done the same thing again."

Instead he set about orchestrating an animal-striped, tie-dyed, heat-sensitive-inked collection hilariously based on the heavy-metal romance between Stephanie Seymour and Axl Rose. An intern friend secretly mined Xeroxes of supermodels and their rock-star boyfriends from the British Vogue library for him. Stuart Vevers of Mulberry (and, soon, of Loewe) stepped in to do the bags, and when Holland mentioned to Katie Hillier, the London-based accessories designer for Marc by Marc Jacobs, over a drink at Shoreditch House that he wanted to do jewelry, "she said, 'Oh, God, I'll sort that out for you!' So we did solid-gold letter rings, one for each finger."

It's those sorts of connections with superprofessional people who have one foot in luxury worlds and the other in Hoxton Square's Boombox nightclub that's revved up London. Old Street eastward to Hackney and Dalston is the hotbed, where designers live side by side with artists, gallerists, and the local Kurdish-African-Afghan communities in some of London's grimiest neighborhoods. "I read there are more artists per square inch in the East End than anywhere else in Europe," observes Lee Farmer, who designs 40-color rainbow-striped bias-knit dresses with his partner, Alice Smith, under the name Alice Lee. "Talent is flourishing here like nowhere else on Earth," testifies the Greek-Austrian Marios Schwab. "I miss the dynamic even if I go to Paris for a few days."

The perfectionist Schwab worked on his spring collection with an astonishing intensity of scientific research-and on some even more astonishing prints. "When I first came out, I was part of the London 'body con' thing, but with this collection, I was turning it around, to go inside the body." He means that literally: His amazingly sliced, sculpted shapes evolved from anatomical textbooks and the beautiful coiled pink forms in his prints from medical fiber-optic photographs. ...