The Look

The glitzy runway shows of Paris, Milan, London and New York attract designers, models, journalists, buyers, celebrities, wealthy clients and knock-off merchants. They are all players in a multi-billion-dollar industry. But who sits where? This first film explores the political map of fashion. It also looks at the evolution of the superstar model.

How marketing techniques - diffusion, franchising and licensing - can mean success or failure for a designer. And a look at Giorgio Armani's lessons in labelling.

There is a complex of interests among designers, buyers, retailers and the fashion media, all of whom share a common goal - continuing turnover in a multi-billion dollar industry. Tonight's film analyses the power of the fashion press, and its love/hate relationship with the PR machines of top designers.

From haute couture to high street to street cred, personal identity can be bought off the peg in the form of fads, trends, looks and national styles. Tonight's film analyses the ways in which people create identity through the uniforms they choose to wear.

For these three fashion designers, cloth is the essence of the art of design. Futurist Issey Miyake makes hi-tech, innovative use of fabric; Gianni Versace , loved by film and pop stars, uses vibrant silk prints; and Christian Lacroix creates clothes out of fabric painstakingly hand-woven by former down-and-outs.

No couture season can end without the YSL collection. But the man whom many call the greatest designer of the 20th century is reclusive, sensitive and so dogged by ill health that his company's president Pierre Berge says: "Yves was born with a nervous breakdown." With the benefit of behind-the-scenes access, this profile of Yves Saint Laurent tries to capture the essence of an elusive man.