Why this summer is all about the violet femme

Radiant, beautiful, perfectly fragile - it's little wonder designers adore all things floral. And this summer, says Susannah Frankel, frocks are positively blooming

Vintage Laura Ashley may be enjoying something of a revival, but in the world of haute-couture, merely printing spring flowers on to a frock simply won't do. 'Well, I'm not going to print daffodils on a dress, am I?' roars Alexander McQueen, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It would certainly be a more anodyne gesture than is usual from a designer famed for an emotionally complex - and, some might even say, disturbing - approach.

Instead, then, every shade of faded pink and lilac to be found in an English country garden appears throughout McQueen's current collection. More eerily romantic still, silk petals are trapped in floor-sweeping tulle skirts, and a finale dress, designed specifically for his Paris show in September, was constructed entirely out of fresh blooms, from peonies to old-fashioned roses. All of this spoke of an Arcadian beauty undercut by melancholy that is quintessentially McQueen.

'I used flowers because they die,' explains the designer. 'Nothing is forever. There was a fragility to this collection, to the idea that nothing is permanent, that beauty disappears. I was inspired by the artists Marc Quinn and Sam Taylor-Wood. The flowers were frozen. They broke when they melted, and fell to the floor.'

Yves Saint Laurent's Stefano Pilati has also used flowers for their symbolic beauty - rather than just for their hippie-chic prettiness. The designer's spring/summer catwalk was dense with fresh violets. 'I was thinking about how to translate the feeling that normally invades us when spring starts, and towards the summer,' Pilati says.

'That feeling of escape, of liberation, that desire for the sun, and of leaving responsibility behind.'

The violets on the catwalk - and those cut in chiffon that appear scattered across the gown pictured opposite - are a symbol of hope, he explains. 'In ancient Greece the violet was a symbol of humility and virginity, and so very feminine in its fragility. The models broke down their own symbolism when they walked on the flowers, which was intended as a gentle and elegant way to show vulnerability.'

A rather more naive take, but one that resulted in floral headdresses and neckpieces that are also gorgeous to behold, comes from the Danish-born designer Peter Jensen. His inspiration this season is the work of the American art photographer Tina Barney, whose images of her family and friends, shot on Rhode Island between the 1970s and now, are a world away from today's fast-living metropolitan life.

And that, perhaps, is the point. There's a determinedly escapist and bucolic mood infiltrating summer dressing, counteracting the more hard-edged, sci-fi aesthetic also on the agenda, everywhere from Dolce & Gabbana to Balenciaga. This is nowhere more evident than in designers' treatment of nature itself.

Think of the usually urbane Marc Jacobs who, at Louis Vuitton, has scattered bodices and hairbands with rosebuds, and, for his own line, sent models out on a grass-green catwalk in frilled dresses, finished with oversized crumpled rosettes worthy of Marie Antoinette. And of Roksanda Ilincic, whose collection features dresses, the overblown silhouettes of which resemble the most blowsy of blooms.

Any discussion of Elysian Fields would, of course, be incomplete without a look at what Vivienne Westwood has to offer. For her current collection, the grande dame of British fashion may have favoured graffiti as opposed to floral prints, but the show backdrop featured cartoonish scribbles of Magic Roundabout- esque trees and hyper-real grass. One Westwood corset-clad model, moreover, tripped down the runway carrying what will no doubt go down as the 'it' bag of the spring/summer 2007 season: a fetching moss-green 'watering can', complete with petal-pink slogan and a shimmering old-gold rose.

In the end, this all makes for thoroughly charming viewing, and for clothing that indulges in unadulterated feminine fantasy but that is, at its best, light but not frothy, and supremely elegant to boot.