"Accessories reduced to the minimum - to focus again on garments," said Dries Van Noten, referring to his concentration of color and pattern that - apart from necklets of chunky, colorful rings - was all about the clothes.

Fresh from his success on the Oscar red carpet, where a heavily pregnant Cate Blanchett wore his eggplant purple dress, Van Noten announced that his collection was about "real dressed up clothes."

With almost the same intensity of pattern and color as for the summer season, the Belgian designer was inspired by marble to make prints as sophisticated and artistic as bookends.

The secret, as always, in fashion, was the dosage. With quiet accessories - just a plain clutch bag and simple tan sandals, sometimes with matching gloves - the clothes had their chance in the sun. A little too literally in some cases, where a heavily embroidered pink jacket or a melange of prints looked more like summer than winter 2008. But many of these embroideries, done with wooden beads, were subtle. And the way that dresses flowed over pants, mixing or matching, looked modern.

The surprise was the use of fur, adding to the increasing upscale luxury of Van Noten's line. He might use two different pelts - one smooth, the other curly - in a single coat or fur dyed bright blue. This densely rich but digestible show proved that the designer is - as the Academy Awards dress suggested - moving into fashion's big league.

Lacroix toned down the opulence and excess to produce one of his most focused ready-to-wear collections. It had a touch of the 1980s in the models' tough chic, upswept rouleau hairdos and in the bold, curving shapes of the clothes. But this was not the effervescent, over-the-top Lacroix of that early era but one who had caught the spirit of fashion now. Gone was the too-much-is-never-enough embellishment - and that included accessories, that were reduced to bangles to match a pond-green fur or a bracelet with a single cross dangling free.

"Women are like insects - defending themselves inside a carapace but coming out to seduce," was Lacroix's take on the show's attitude. It explained some of the coat silhouettes that curved at the back but in malleable fabrics and caught with a bow. There was color, of course, with skirts and dresses in the painterly prints for which the designer is famous. But there were, significantly, no grand gowns to end the show and some of the most powerful pieces were decorated with tactile mixes of fur and feathers - but all in black.