For those of us who are bored already with traditional fashion weeks, London Swatch Alternative Fashion Week 2009 presents a good, well, alternative. This event will be held from April 21-25, 2009, at Spitalfields Traders Market (an upscale, elegant version of what we here in the U.S. call a flea market, which centers on fashion and home design items).

London Swatch Alternative Fashion Week is free and features runway shows daily from 1:15 to 2 p.m. Hot, young and up-and-coming designers will present their alternative, inventive designs directly to the public, the press and the fashion industry while competing for a Swatch Individual Designer Award or Swatch College Award in recognition of their originality, creativity or innovative use of designs and recycled textiles.

Twelve designers per day will show their designs to live jazz music, and the event is also an opportunity for new and upcoming models to show off their talent. Categories shown include women's wear, menswear, millinery, shoes, loungewear, lingerie, fetish gear and costuming. Designers who showed last year include Pretty Pervy, Rachel Hines, Richard Shoyemi and Victoria Harley. Jasper Garvida, a Project Catwalk (the UK's version of Project Runway) winner, is the most famous Alternative Fashion Week alumni. This 26-year-old major talent combines old-world elegance with modern sensibility to create collections that are truly worthy of rock royalty. One of the standout pieces from his past collections was a white, off-the-shoulder gown with a ruffled mermaid tail that managed to transcend all clichés except beauty. (I have never seen any garment that would enable you to make more of an entrance, and yet it still enhances the wearer rather than competing with her.) The young designer also showed a richly decadent, floral-patterned skirt paired with a combination corset/cardigan and patterned faux-fur jacket that looked insane in a brilliant way, like Edie Sedgwick raided her grandmother's closet to get dressed to go to the hospital after she burned down the Chelsea Hotel. I write about fashion constantly, and it makes you kind of jaded, but I can truly say that Jasper Garvida is the first designer I've seen in a long time for whom I would be willing to blow my rent money on some of his pieces, so why not go to Alternative Fashion Week 2009 and find the next major talent before he or she becomes out of reach?