As if the Jubilee and the Olympics weren’t enough, this June London fashion will inaugurate its first ever dedicated men’s wear – well, not week, three days! You have to start somewhere.

From June 15-17, 50 designers, including the Savile Row folks and buzzy names like Christopher Kane and JW Anderson, will strut their stuff down the runway during “London Collections: Men.” It’s a big leap forward from the previous situation, which saw a menswear day tacked on to the end of the womenswear shows — at which point all the editors had decamped to Milan, because Gucci opened at the same time. But it doesn’t go far enough.

Yes, the announcement marks an interesting evolution in British fashion thinking. Perhaps its global leverage doesn’t reside in womenswear after all. For years Savile Row has been banging on about the need to protect its heritage, and the UK tailoring tradition, and the fact that London menswear is possibly a stronger international brand than, say, London womenswear, which tends to get more institutional support (the residents of 10 Downing street keep having cocktail parties to open the women’s shows).

Certainly, when it comes to heritage names, menswear labels like Huntsman and Gieves & Hawkes have shown greater resiliency and economic and aesthetic power that the women’s, as the recent Aquascutum debacle demonstrates. And it’s great that the British Fashion Council, which organizes the shows, took the initiative and organized the men’s brands into a cohesive whole.

But what really niggles for me – the loose thread in all this, if you will – is the evolution in thinking that DIDN’T happen: the fact that the BFC didn’t seize the chance to re-imagine the whole concept of collection from the ground up.

Presumably, the idea behind launching this summer was to piggy back on the current all-eyes-on-London period. This risks event fatigue however – especially given that London men’s comes just before the men’s shows in Florence, which come before the men’s shows in Milan and then Paris – especially given that compared to the Olympics and the Jubilee, men’s fashion week is rather less of a once-in-an-era hoo-ha (if you don’t cover it this season, you can always go next). Even more importantly, however, it is, in form and content, more of the same.

And really, if you are starting from scratch, why have a traditional fashion week at all? If there’s one consistent industry feeling about the current state of the collections, it’s that they don’t work: they are enormously expensive for both brands and buyers, they are a mish-mash of trade show and marketing expense, their twice-a-year-schedule bears no relationship to the almost year-round product delivery schedule of brands. The BFC had an opportunity here to propose a new way of doing things.

We have the technology – see the recent and very successful initiative from US events powerhouse KCD that put shows on-line – and this could be the moment to use it, to transform the entire show universe, first created in the 1960s, into a contemporary experience. The new London shows would have been the perfect opportunity to break the mold, and set an industry precedent.

Instead, well — it’s an old look.