Antonio Berardi

If your wardrobe needs one true showpiece, Berardi is built for exactly that. He is known above all for his sensual, figure-hugging dresses and a striking, classical, dressed-up style that leans on advanced fabrics and manufacturing techniques. This is occasion dressing rather than everyday separates, so the value lands when you want a single dress to do all the talking.

Dresses, first and foremost. His signature is the sensual, figure-hugging gown executed in a classical, dressed-up register, often built around inventive fabrics and construction. If you are shopping the label for one piece, an eveningwear dress is the most quintessentially Berardi choice.

Antonio Berardi, born in 1968, is a British fashion designer of Sicilian descent. He was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, to Sicilian parents who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s, and that dual British-Italian thread runs right through his sensibility.

He took the classic route through London's most famous fashion school. After Lincoln College of Art and Design, Berardi worked as an assistant to John Galliano, then in 1990, applying for a third time, he was accepted into Central Saint Martins on the programme led by Wendy Dagworthy.

He currently shows at London Fashion Week, the city where his design story began. Over the years he has also presented in Milan and Paris, so his runway history spans all three of the major European fashion capitals.

That would be the trompe-l'œil corset dress in black and white with lace detailing, worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in November 2008 at the premiere of the film Two Lovers. It was named Dress of the Year for 2009 by Harper's Bazaar, and it remains one of the label's defining red-carpet moments.

His references are wide-ranging and unmistakably his own. Berardi has named music, independent film, post-modern art, Catholic symbolism, Italian art and culture, urban street style, lingerie and the female form as influences. That blend of the sacred and the sensual is exactly why his eveningwear feels charged rather than safe.

In Milan in 2003 he showed a coat illuminated with light bulbs that lit up to form a crucifix, a perfect distillation of his love of Catholic symbolism and spectacle. It is a useful reminder that beneath the wearable gowns sits a genuinely conceptual designer.

His pieces are deliberately figure-hugging and sensual, cut close to the body rather than forgiving. Because so much of the effect comes from that sculpted silhouette and the engineered fabrics, it is worth checking proportions carefully and, if you are between sizes, erring toward the one that lets the construction sit cleanly.