All Paris awaits the coming of the plumber's son from Streatham

Tomorrow, the haute couture season starts in Paris. Despite the French capital being distinctly out of fashion with many people right now - what with nuclear testing and the beleaguered Chirac administration - the international fashion pack can hardly contain its excitement about a week-long show of posh frocks in the city of light.

For a new couturier is to be born. To the fashion pack - which comprises some of the richest women in the world, some of the superest of million- dollar models, plus countless hangers-on and scores of journalists (including this one) - this is the most thrilling of news. Add to it that the new couturier is British and that he is the son of a Streatham plumber (and has therefore made one of those particularly arduous journeys to good fortune much loved by the press) - and the fact that the name John Galliano is likely to be chanted like a mantra on TV and in newsprint early next week is explained.

Galliano began his career in Paris living out of a suitcase. Now, for a rumoured pounds 150,000-plus per season, he has taken over the helm at the House of Givenchy after its namesake, who founded it 43 years ago, retired last July. Usually couturiers do not retire, they die after a final last day spent tweaking the exact fit of a sleeve. The fashion house that Hubert de Givenchy founded is now owned by the luxury goods giant, LVMH, headed by Bernard Arnault, one of the most steely businessmen in France. The 68-year-old Givenchy is not expected to attend the first show of a successor he had no part in choosing.

Galliano will grab press attention whether he swims or (unlikely) sinks. As well as the clothes, (at haute couture level these are made-to-measure and cost as much as a family car, or indeed, a bungalow), he is assured of the kind of celebrity presence which characterises a red-hot fashion show. Whitney Houston, Sharon Stone, Elizabeth Hurley and Melanie Griffiths already wear clothes designed under his eponymous ready-to-wear label (which is underwritten by John Bult, chairman of the New York-based Paine Webber International). That old clotheshorse Madonna is also a Galliano fan. She allegedly recently asked him, c/o Givenchy, to create special costumes for her in-the-works film project Evita. The real Eva Peron wore couture, mostly Dior. However, Galliano has sent regrets that he is too busy to be of assistance.

His show is at 4.30pm on Sunday in a football stadium. Not for him a gilded salon - the usual venue of haute couture shows - nor the ballroom of a smart Paris hotel. Instead, his first couture show will be out in the suburbs with, it is rumoured, 56 models (a huge number).

Galliano is not only the first to take over the haute couture house of a retired designer; he is also the first Briton for nearly 80 years to climb to the top of fashion's glassy pyramid. In 1857, an Englishman called Charles Frederick Worth became the first haute couturier ever when he set up shop in Paris and became the designer of choice to Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III. His only antecedents were the court dressmakers of yore. In 1919 another Briton, Captain Edward Molyneux, followed a distinguished war career, which cost him an eye and twice earned him the Military Cross, by opening a fashion house in Paris. Molyneux finally closed his Paris house in 1950.

The rumour is that the show on which Galliano's future rests will be a tribute to the golden age of the House of Givenchy, when the late Audrey Hepburn, Hubert de Givenchy's lifelong muse, was a gamine girl who had just filmed Billy Wilder's Roman Holiday. The rumour is that Galliano (who always makes use of historical references in his work) has been poring over pictures of Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Funny Face, which were costumed by Hubert de Givenchy. Despite speculation, though, the doors of Givenchy are being kept firmly closed to prying eyes.

Several other big guns - Valentino, Christian Lacroix, Chanel, Gianni Versace and Balmain - will show during haute couture week, too. Although these designers cannot fail to realise that Galliano at Givenchy is the hot gossip, they are not letting any opportunity pass by to promote their own stellar brand.

A couture day dress starts at about pounds 8,000. A wedding dress will cost at least pounds 25,000 and there are people who can afford them. But the real reason that the seemingly anachronistic business of making opulent clothes to measure has survived is because it is largely a loss-leader. Haute couture promotes brand names applied to lipsticks, fragrances and bed linen that ordinary mortals can afford to buy. Designers rely on the publicity generated by haute couture week and they are making sure, even with Galliano, that they get their slice of it.

The week starts tomorrow with Gianni Versace's show, likely to be a glitzy, glamorous affair played out on a catwalk purpose-built over the subterranean swimming pool of the Paris Ritz. It is not the official opening because Versace, an Italian, is not deemed by the austere Chambre Syndicale de la Federation Francais de la Couture et du Pret a Porter (the organisation that strictly regulates the Paris shows) to be a bona fide couturier. But as far as the fashion pack is concerned, the Versace show is the first opportunity since the last round of shows finished in November to check out everyone else's new Prada handbags and the ever- changing colour of Linda Evangelista's hair.

Valentino (who most famously dressed Jackie Onassis and whose clients today number some of the wealthiest women on earth) is hoping his latest batch of extravagant clothes - to be shown on Monday - will be almost enough to attract attention on their own. But in case he needs a little extra lift, he has changed his show venue from the gilded Grand Hotel to L'Opera Garnier, with its fine Chagall murals.

Chanel, designed by Karl Lagerfeld, is changing its show venue in a way that is guaranteed to cause a stir. Usually the latest in tweed, braid and invisible corsetry is revealed before an audience of 1,300. But this year the Chanel show is being staged in a salon at the Ritz which seats 300. There will be an A-list and a B-list. A-list clients and media will see the show live. The B-list will see the show by closed-circuit TV, beamed into the mirrored salon of the Chanel headquarters across the street. C-list people, who in the past have climbed through toilet windows or forged their tickets to get into the bigger venues, will have to make do with standing in the rue Cambon waiting for models who will turn up for a post-show photocall. An attention-grabbing bun fight is bound to ensue.

Pierre Balmain will also attract attention. The line is designed by the New York-based Dominican, Oscar de la Renta, who is adored by Mrs Chirac and by Pamela Harriman, the US ambassador to France. This year sees 50 years of the House of Balmain (the long-dead company namesake cemented his reputation by making film costumes for Katharine Hepburn and Jennifer Jones) and a glittering ball presided over by Mrs Chirac will be held next week.

Yves Saint Laurent has been showing in the stuffy Hotel Intercontinental for ever and will show there again next week. No change here and no change from the president of Saint Laurent, Pierre Berge, the grim reaper of haute couture, who has been predicting that it will die out the minute the famously frail Saint Laurent shuffles off his mortal coil, thus stirring up ghoulish publicity that the great man is about to drop dead on the catwalk and therefore ensuring no show of his can be missed. In fact, Saint Laurent still looks as hearty as his beloved bulldog, Mujik.

Christian Lacroix is not moving venues or courting a gilded celebrity presence for his show, which will bring the season to a close next Thursday. He will be relying on his eclectic mix of zestful, exuberant clothes.

But he will be watching Galliano. In 1987 Lacroix was the focus of attention when he became the first couturier for 25 years to open a house in his own name. Then a perfume, C'est la Vie, was launched for him - but too soon, before his name was well enough known in the North American market. His backers lost money. It is unlikely that the Galliano stamp will be put on money-spinning perfume before everyone has heard of him. But that may not take too long, depending on the outcome of that first show out in a distant football stadium on Sunday.