More than 50 London designers presented collections, either on runways or in showrooms around the city.
On July 27 and 28, pottery studios, kilns and showrooms around the Hilltown region will open to the public.
The mausoleum is still the focal point of their demonstrations, though to reach it they now have to march past the luxury car showrooms around the square.
"I call it the Big Easy," said Joan Kaner, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus, who did not attend the Milan and Paris shows "for safety reasons" but who spent last week writing spring orders in showrooms around Manhattan.
It promised "more choice than Oxford Street", offering more than 30,000 products from 350 brand names, and employed 100 staff at a central warehouse and showrooms around the UK.
Like clothing stores, restaurants and banks before them, automakers are now trying to convey a brand image not only with their cars but also with their stores, by leaning on their dealers to build look-alike showrooms around the country.
But as names like Studebaker and Peerless faded from popular consciousness, so too did the memory of the bustling and often extravagant showrooms around Columbus Circle in Manhattan and along Bedford Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
With 1,660 exhibitors of furniture at the official fairgrounds and hundreds more scattered in improvised showrooms around the city, the annual Milan furniture fair has outstripped the twice-yearly fashion shows as the most explosive display of style since Cleopatra sat on an asp.
J n Laub, left, and Markus Jehs of the German firm Jehs + Laub, are responsible for the coming redesign of Mercedes-Benz showrooms around the world, and the automotive influence seems to have rubbed off: the Space Lounge, the pair's newest creation, features four upholstered foam pads that clip into an injection-molded nylon shell like the components of a dashboard.
In the days before Fashion Week, which begins Feb. 13, a similar story has been playing out in showrooms around the city, as designers adapt to a new reality, one in which talking about new clothes means talking about the new economy.
