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When Stephen Gan (left) launched Visionaire magazine at the beginning of the decade, he was having some fun with friends - printing the work of artists, illustrators, photographers, stylists and designers not commercial enough to make it in a magazine world led by advertisers and PRs. Six years later, Visionaire is about to publish issue 22 with star photographer Mario Testino as guest editor. A book, Visionaire's Fashion 2000, heralding the designers who will change the shape of fashion in the next decade, is published next month, at less than the cover price of an issue of the magazine. It promises to be the ultimate coffee-table style guide.

Issey Miyake's clothing looks to the future, photographed by Jean- Paul Goude (left). Miyake formulated a vision without precedent and without boundaries. He is best known for his pleating, which first appeared in his collection in 1989 and spun off into the Pleats Please line in 1993. Miyake sees fashion as an act of communication between designer and wearer: "There is no meaning in clothes unless they're worn by people."

Alexander McQueen's military coat, photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde (below). McQueen left his earliest mark on the fashion world at the tender age of 16, when he was working as a tailor's apprentice at Anderson and Sheppard in Savile Row. It was a bit of graffiti scrawled on the lining of a jacket that was destined, legend had it, for the back of the Prince of Wales: "McQueen was 'ere".

Julien Macdonald's cobweb knits, photographed by Sean Ellis (top row): one day Julien went off to the big city (London) and enrolled in the Royal College of Art. His graduation presentation caught the eye of a certain fairy godmother (it was Karl Lagerfeld, actually), and the next thing Julien knew, poof!, he was whisked off to Paris to become the knitwear designer for Chanel. Julien returned to London in the spring of 1997 when he presented his own collection, Mermaids. Yohji Yamamoto's cartwheel hat, photographed by Nick Knight (bottom): Yohji Yamamoto's ideal is a liberated, independent woman whose image floated in his mind like a ghost for some time. He could never fully grasp her and described her in terms of what she was not: not young, not Japanese. "She is a woman who has given up being a woman," he explained in 1988. "But she is incredibly sexy to me."

lot of balderdash is talked about "the millennium". In January 1999, the minute hand will strike midnight and it will be all change. Sweatshirts and jeans will be replaced by space suits and Bacofoil jump suits.

In his foreword to Fashion 2000, published next month, the book's editor Stephen Gan introduces an A to Z of the designers who will lead fashion into the new millennium, from Azzedine Alaia through a good handful of British names including Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Antonio Berardi, to the Japanese avant-garde designer Junya Watanabe, and Yohji Yamamoto. There is not a space suit in sight. "What is the look of fashion at the turn of the millennium?" Gan asks. "When we look back several years from now, will we see a minimalist silhouette by a designer such as Helmut Lang and say it was a period of existentialism? Or a corseted baroque ensemble by John Galliano for Dior Couture and say that this was another belle epoque?"

This is not a book about trends and skirt lengths, more a celebration of the multifarious faces of fashion today. In 1997, anything goes. Gan himself has, to some extent, helped shape the look of fashion in the Nineties. Since 1991, he has been editing Visionaire, the highly collectable quarterly art and fashion magazine he founded with a group of friends. It changes in shape and form from issue to issue, most recently manifesting itself in the shape of a deck of glossy playing cards contained in a jewellery box. Visionaire is paid for by the cover price (around pounds 65 per issue) rather than by advertising revenue. "We've never made a distinction between art and fashion," says Gan of his "album of inspiration".

Visionaire is about images rather than words, spurred on by a lust for creativity rather than the usual restrictions of advertising and PR; it allows contributors, who include illustrators, painters, photographers and designers, to express themselves freely. It is a hit and miss affair. Some of the work is obscure beyond human understanding. Likewise, Visionaire's Fashion 2000 does not set out to make fashion accessible, easy to wear, or understand. Art and fashion have become inextricably intertwined: dresses on the haute couture catwalks seem to serve only the purpose of being made into desirable images, shot for advertising campaigns by photographers who show their work in art galleries as well as on advertising billboards.

Gan accepts that fashion designers' ideas are often not meant for anyone other than the six-feet-tall, stick-thin models who wear them on catwalks. If a designer wants to make clothes fit for an art gallery rather than a shopping arcade, then let them. It's their choice: it's their mortgages and bills that have to be paid at the end of the month, after all. And choice is what fashion at the turn of the millennium is all about

`Visionaire's Fashion 2000: Designers at the Turn of the Millennium', will be published by Laurence King on 27 October, price pounds 19.95

Antonio Berardi's take on masculine v feminine, photographed by Sandro Sodano (top right): Antonio Berardi is the kind of designer who can show knickers - both the dandy 18th-century to the knee kind and the risque 20th century barely- bringing-up-the-rear kind - and get away with it. Plein Sud's tiger prawn dress photographed by Jean-Paul Goude (right).