Amidst all the New York Fashion Week craze, I nearly had forgotten about our beloved Kate Lanphear, style director of US Elle.

No worries though—Kate is a regular on the London Fashion Week circuit and took some time out before the headline-making Burberry show to talk about how the city has (or hasn’t?) changed over the past years.

“Everything changes but everything stays the same. When you are on the bandwagon going from city to city, every city really does have its own flavor and its own feeling and its own voice, and I don’t think the voice here in London changed so dramatically. You really get the feeling it one-upped itself, it upped the ante and everything had to become a little bit more polished and produced, for better or for worse.”

A style icon herself, Kate points out that she’s seen some of the best conceptions come from the UK capital: “Coming here in the past, I have always said, some of the best ideas I have seen any place, every season—maybe sometimes the execution wasn’t quite there, but the ideas certainly were—were in London.”