The young designer Arienne Birchler, a graduate of the famous Antwerp Fashion Academy, would like her “women’s collection 09” to be seen as an attempt to lend expression to her own personal conceptions of beauty and aesthetics. She has mentioned the films of the Chinese director Wong Kar Wai as an important source of her inspiration. And indeed the melancholy, the erotically charged longing, the unusual colours and the mixture of nostalgia and modernism that characterise his films are all to be recognised in the clothes and accessories of the collection. Ms Birchler has succeeded in bringing intractable colours, patterns and materials together so as to result in a quietly consonant harmony. Her fashion makes an impression that is sensuously feminine and elegant at once, and testifies to her fine feeling for the spirit of the times.