When Dubai sees the opening of its first Fashion TV hotel, expected by the end of next year and complete with the world's largest LED screen broadcasting the channel around the clock, one thing had better be à la mode: the staff uniforms.

After all, Fashion TV will be up against the likes of the new Burj Khalifa Armani hotel, not to mention plans afoot for hotels in Dubai from Elie Saab and Karl Lagerfeld, the latter on Isla Moda, with uniforms designed by Victoria Beckham.

They will be joining the ranks of designers who have either opened hotels in recent years - Versace, Christian Lacroix and Missoni among them - or been hired to make the concierge more catwalk. If fashion insight has long been tapped for the public face of bars and airlines, hotels have come late to the idea but are making up for lost time, with Michael Kors, Yohji Yamamoto, Cynthia Rowley and even Gwen Stefani having signed to design in recent years, as well as increasingly specialist, style-literate corporate uniform design companies.

"So many hotels are opening now that the uniform is becoming vital to giving each an identity, which means proprietors are ready to accept more creativity to get something distinctive," says Feizel Virani, the designer for the Dubai-based Dream Uniforms.

The company is behind the style at The Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, as well as The Palm's Jumeirah Zabeel Saray hotel, with uniforms featuring a new blend of grey flannel with black-and-gold embroidered jackets.