hooray for hollywould; With the launch of her new resort line of bright, slinky jersey dresses, there's little doubt accessories designer Holly Dunlap is headed for the big time, as Hamish Bowles discovers.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

On a balmy spring morning in Florence, Holly Dunlap is turning the heads of what would appear to be the city's entire male population. Her blonde mane pulled into a ponytail and her eyes veiled with Chanel shades, Dunlap's svelte form is dressed for a Palm Beach afternoon as she sets off for the buzzing Caffe Giacosa (owned by Roberto Cavalli and decorated with his trademark flamboyance) in the city center. She is wearing a Dolce tropical-print blouse and

second-skin jeans hip-slung with a 1960s gold scale belt. Over

her shoulder she carries a golden sun-ray bag of her own design, and on her pretty feet (nails painted

brightest coral) her gleaming golden spaghetti-strap mules, cinched with glittering topaz and rhinestone clasps, provide a percussion accompaniment as they clatter on the cobbled streets.

Dunlap will have need of the cafe's potent cappuccino to kick-start her day. Since she moved to Florence in 1999 to launch her Hollywould line of shoes and handbags-now expanded to include a capsule collection of form-revealing jersey dresses-she must have clocked hundreds of thousands of miles on the hair-raising autostradas. Only in the last six months has she taken on an assistant. "Usually every day we spend from sunrise to sunset in our car," says Dunlap, and she isn't exaggerating. With factories for shoes, handbags, woven leather, embroidery, and print spread from Bologna to Como, Dunlap's car functions as her mobile office and sometime design laboratory.

Dunlap sketches wherever she can, on scraps of paper tucked into her agenda books, in traffic jams, or in the cheery Auto Grill cafes built over the motorway bridges that serve as her local diners (they have unexpectedly delicious food and are owned mostly by the Benetton family; does fashion enter every aspect of