Fashion week gossip

Celebrity sightings

One for all the dedicated fans of Nick Cave out there - his son Josh Lazenby took to the runways for Akira Isogawa early on in the week. And speaking of musical Australians, there were cries of "Good Lord, who is that short man and what is he doing on the runway?" at the One Teaspoon show. No, the crowd was not seeing things. It was indeed the diminutive Leo Sayer, singing, dancing and being dwarfed by two statuesque pole dancing women in bikinis. Very odd, very unexpected, very funny.

Looking exceedingly dapper and rather hot in the front row of Toni Maticevski's show was the well-groomed swimmer Ian Thorpe, sporting a long coat, faux-hawk and stubble.

This year's celeb-of-the-week prize went to British model Lily Cole, who was flown to Australia especially for the event. Amusingly, all week long the mainstream Australian press kept confusing her distinctive round cheeks and red hair with another, popular flame-haired vixen, local model Tiah.

Last year pretty Australian model Michelle Lewis was a regular on the runways. Then she became a regular in the local newspapers after being arrested and held in a Bali prison on drug smuggling charges, later dropped. Which meant that this year she didn't really get a lot of runway work. Instead she got a few front seat shows and lots of mentions in the gossip columns due to the poor girl's newfound notoriety.

Biggest scandal

It may have been the fact that local darlings sass & bide are not as popular in overseas boutiques as everyone thinks they are because their prices have skyrocketed. Or it could have been the fact that one local newspaper, clearly desperate for a headline, dusted all the surfaces in the loos at Fashion Week venues and found evidence of illegal drugs there. Hardly surprising really. It is Sydney after all.

Get rich fast

Taking a leaf out of Tsubi's book on how to put on outrageous shows, the blokes from One Teaspoon arranged a sort of fake bank robbery onstage during their show. They then threw their loot, bags of money, at the audience. What the audience didn't immediately realise was that some of the money, around $15,000 of it, was real. A few excited fashion writers, stylists and photographers were left holding cold, hard cash. And they also didn't realise the whole scramble was being filmed by the designers. It was a social experiment apparently.