KEY POINTS:
Judging by last week's fashion shows in Milan, clothes makers have fallen in love again: with art, with romance and lots of pretty girls.
The new romance was the predominant trend and a "new movement" is all about the fluid and flowing; inspired by artists such as John Everett Millais, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Gustav Klimt, along with others of the Art Nouveau and Pre-Raphaelite periods.
Miuccia Prada, the high priestess of Italian style, known for black nylon, "ugly chic" and, more recently, a harsh, techno-urban mood, instigated the new trend with the most romantic collection she has ever sent onto the catwalk.
Her back-to-nature collection was inspired by the German Art Nouveau movement; everything curved, nothing straight. Models appeared like wood nymphs, with wild hair and dark eyes a-glitter.
The inspiration extended to shoes, with heels of hand-carved, hand-painted orchids, tulips and roses.
Alberta Ferretti's models could have stepped straight out of an Alma-Tadema classical canvas. Styled like bacchante, ancient Roman goddesses or even Caesar's wife, they wore draped, toga-gowns with fresco-print hems, in pale, plaster colours, or cascading in soft folds from silver necklets and loose knots.
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana made the artistic theme contemporary, sending hundreds of metres of silk and tulle to a school of painters in Lake Como, where they were splashed and daubed with roses, peonies, daffodils and orchids.
Roberto Cavalli eschewed his sock-it-to-me glitz and glam approach in favour of dresses in floral chiffon, white muslin detailed with lace and cutwork like Victorian petticoats, or flowing goddess-gowns imprinted with photographic images of flowers.
Donatella Versace, too, stripped away the ornamentation and embellishment. Her dresses, in a beige-to-bright palette, were in satin and silk jersey, flowing over the body like liquid and featuring toga-drapes, tasselled scarves and knotted or beaded straps.
Giorgio Armani took a more gipsy-inspired line, with the fringed scarf as the basis for sarong-style dresses, dhoti-trousers and a sequinned headscarf as the omnipresent accessory.
Graceful, sari-influenced dresses in a mix of tropical prints and the label's zigzag and space-dye knits highlighted Angela Missoni's collection for Missoni.
At Fendi, Karl Lagerfeld worked on a theme of circles used as a print and fur-applique technique on dresses and full skirts worn with little capes.
