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The fashion spotlight shined on Los Angeles this week, giving West Coast designers the perfect stage for their imaginations — sophisticated ladies, Latin lovelies, incurable flirts and so much more.

David Cardona: While being young has myriad advantages in Los Angeles, for David Cardona, experience — 10 years of it — is finally paying off. The former engineer spent the last five years quietly building his business, catering to sophisticated clients and a handful of celebs with his simple, elegant eveningwear. But can Cardona also meet the needs of a wider market?

In a word: Yes. The collection he sent out proved he’s finally found the perfect balance between fresh styling and familiar classics, all tempered with his signature razor-sharp tailoring. There was plenty of silk twill and clean-cut charmeuse, and his sexy leathers skimmed the body. But it was the subtle details that really stood out. A beige suede skirt, for example, featured a dropped waistline that curved seductively around the hips, while a belted canvas motorcycle jacket topped a striped godet skirt that swished around the model’s knees as she walked the Pollack-like paint-splattered runway. Even in his sassier moments — a V-neck minidress covered in icy blue beads — he retained a certain refinement keeping the hemline at a more sophisticated than saucy height.

Eduardo Lucero: No girls allowed. While such a sign doesn’t mark Eduardo Lucero’s Beverly Boulevard atelier, it might as well. The Cuban-American designs with women in mind, particularly the Latina ideal who makes no apologies for being curvy and uber glam. Nor does he make apologies for loving a little beaded sparkle or plunging necklines or even the va-va-voom of red and hot pink played together. New to his liquid charmeuse or lacey diva gowns were handkerchief hems and plenty of strategically placed lace insets with red-carpet appeal. Even the looks that could work befor

Whether they are making dresses out of football jerseys or slashing hems, the free-spirited designers who showed during L.A. Fashion Week gave local fashion a strong image of experimentation for spring.

Some carved-out collections seemingly armed with little more than ambition and scissors. Others, such as Michelle Mason and Eduardo Lucero, brought rigorous training and an understanding of the finer points of dressmaking and marketing. Many, like Petro Zillia or Josh and He Yang, offered highly personal expressions that function more like wearable artwork that cannot be easily copied for mainstream fashion.

Then there were the unwearable works in virtually every collection. For several seasons, many designers have been exploring alternative methods of construction in an attempt to define a new mode in fashion. Their unsewn seams, experimental construction and use of vintage or recycled clothes defiantly and sometimes awkwardly populated runways this week. Perhaps because local designers often get their start by dressing stars for photo shoots, many seem to have an allergy to proper construction or a dependence on stagy, fantasy clothes. Too often, however, these experimental, dramatic clothes have been seen elsewhere--and in better form.

If L.A.’s designers were unified on one point, it was that tricked-out jeans and T-shirts are still the uniform of the young, hip and fashionable.

Show reviews follow:

GenArt

Nearly 2,000 of L.A.’s hippest and coolest filed into the ornate but underused Los Angeles Theater downtown to see eight-item collections from a dozen local clothing and accessories designers. They were selected by GenArt, a nonprofit group that holds shows yearly in New York and L.A. for emerging talent. Though every capsule collection had its hits and misses, Jerusalem-born Rami Kashou, 25, exhibited the elements that often add up to success: well-made clothes that are original and in step with current trends. His voluminous maxi-