It seems apt to start London's menswear shows on Father's Day. The schedule is peppered with father figures, living and long gone: Paul Smith, Hardy Amies, Alexander McQueen. And the city's entire fashion history is dominated by father figures, from Beau Brummell to Malcolm McLaren, and by the tension between respect and rebellion which those traditions continue to create.

Alongside David Hockney and Morrissey, Lou Dalton has regularly cited the importance of her Teddy Boy father's influence on her work - his pride in appearance, his non-conformist streak, and his innate sense of style - and his belief in her ambition and potential. And those attributes become more clearly evident each season, as Dalton moves further away from the classical furrows of tailoring in search of a way of making menswear that feels truthful to today.

Her key word this season was 'control'- a mood you could sense in the collection's precise, almost clinical stance. Lightweight fabrics and meshes revealed harnesses under tailored jackets and baseball shirts, creating high, slim shoulder lines. Flatly embedded detailing and fine-knit sweaters layered in a sharp, more contemporary language, their splashes of red, white and cornflower blue jolting Dalton's faded grey, glum brick and navy palette firmly into the present.

It all felt deeply, calmly resolved. But what was most interesting, as ever, was the imprecision - the fault lines between ideas, the slipping into the gaps between tradition and invention. Splinters of the past - drowsy countryside plaids, outsized keepers' pockets, utility details - kept breaking in, evoking moments of half-remembered familiarity beneath the collection's disciplined newness. It was, as the show notes stated, a moment of definition. Happy Father's Day, Mr. Dalton.