Creative director at Vionnet Goga Ashkenazi is of the 'if it ain't broke' school of designing. But that's all well and good when the tenets upon which the house was founded - simple, fluid beauty, draped to enhance the female body and to move with it rather than restrict - remain every bit as relevant now as they were under Madeleine Vionnet in the early twentieth century.

'When a woman smiles, her dress should smile with her,' that legend once said, and the house's spring 2014 was similarly upbeat, in soft powder blue, white and primrose. 

These colours were mixed on sharply tailored shirting that descended into flowing lines of sheer tulle and chiffon wrapped around waists, shoulders and hips. Column gowns were cut away at the back and held with the thinnest of spaghetti straps. Others were pinned at the shoulder, chiton-style in the neo-classical manner of the maison.

There were digressions from this too though, in pannier-hipped and carrot-leg trousers, and mesh T-shirts that sat boxily with them.

It felt modern and pretty, savvy in a certain amount of sensuality but easy and elegant. Just as the founder would have wanted, in fact.