Party on

Fashion needs the energy - and the dressing-up opportunities - of parties as much as it needs designers. And this week, the designers, photographers, models and fashion followers in attendance for the first leg of the show season have been partying as never before.

To open the week on Sunday night, there was what may well have been the party of the season, hosted at the In and Out gentlemen's club in Piccadilly by the reigning doyenne of fashion herself, Miuccia Prada. To celebrate her first Miu Miu show in London (she has swapped venues from New York), Mrs Prada brought in John Galliano's favourite DJ, Jeremy Healy, a cocktail bar, gallons of champagne, endless canapes and even a restaurant where revellers were invited to book a table to eat seafood, or bangers, mash and onion gravy (how ironically fashion, Miu).

But forget velvet wedges, Prada shoes for spring. The truly hip will be trying to beg, borrow or steal one of the fine, pin-tucked muslin aprons made by Prada for the waitresses handing out canapes.

Guests caught in the fray of 1,400 carefully selected party people included Bjork, with a hairdo that looked as though she had been caught in a torrential rainstorm - which, indeed, she had - Naomi Campbell and Joaquin Cortes, Vivienne Westwood, the obligatory Tamara Beckwith, Zandra Rhodes, Stephen Fry, Simon and Yasmin Le Bon, and every fashion luvvie worth her little beaded bag and lacy chiffon under-slip. Miuccia got down to Eighties disco classics after her bangers and mash.

On Monday night, the Natural History Museum was the venue for the Tommy's Campaign charity dinner and Harvey Nichols fashion show, the perfect opportunity for more dressing-up, a concept that has escaped the London party scene for years. The Italian Vogue fashion eccentric and hat-stand Anna Piaggi changed her outfit no fewer than three times on Sunday.

Eveningwear sales will be on the up this week as the fashion frenzied hunt for a new outfit for every occasion. By Friday, they will have been to parties hosted by almost every model agency in London and by the shoe designer Patrick Cox, as well as the ultimate glamourfest, courtesy of British Vogue. Between parties, the place to be is the bar of Christina Ong's modern, New-York-style hotel, the Metropolitan, where anyone who is anyone can sit people-watching while waiting the 45 minutes it takes for their pot of tea to arrive.

Last night, before the party hosted by the Spanish designer Amaya Arzuaga, daughter of the Spanish red-wine-producing Arzuaga family, there was a private view at the RCA for the Puerto Rican illustrator Antonio Lopez. This shindig, hosted by Paloma Picasso, Jerry Hall and Calvin Klein, was a fond celebration of the work of the fashion illustrator whose drawings document the early Seventies to mid-Eighties. Lopez was himself an avid party-goer, dancing nights away in Seventies Paris with Paloma, Jerry, Grace Jones and Karl Lagerfeld in his flares, platform boots and silk scarves. His illustrations capture the sequins, the sparkle and glitter, the energy, gold lame, painted faces and false eyelashes of the disco era; there are many parallels to be drawn between Antonio's world and that of the current mood of London