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The big runway shows are zipping along this month in all their international competitive mania - Will Suzy Menkes hate it? Will Carine Roitfeld wear it? Will Anna Wintour even show up? - but there is a different fashion battle being waged on the streets, and the stakes are high. The prize? Just glory. But, sometimes, that's enough.

"It's WWD meets the WWF, Project Runway meets Iron Chef, Duchamp meets Dior!" boasts the promo for New York-based House of Diehl's Style Wars. The House of Diehl, which is the hip duo of MJ Diehl and Roman Milisic - they've shown at New York fashion week, performed with Gwen Stefani and put on design happenings around the world - spent the fall throwing crazy successful underground Style Battles across the United States. (And yes, they want to come to Canada too.)

"Fashion can be so elitist," Milisic says. "This is a great opportunity to reach people who would never get to experience the fashion circus. Someone may have a lot of talent, but if he isn't as connected as Zac Posen and doesn't have $500,000 to mount a collection, even if he has all the imagination, it's very difficult. Style battling is one way to get exposure."

Modelled on MC battling with a splash of haute couture, the Style Wars - currently one-off events in various cities, though there are plans to launch a world tour soon - present hand-picked contestants in clubs who create looks against the clock from surprise materials while the audience photographs, models and whoops it up. Judges have included Shamim Momin, a curator at the Whitney Museum, Casey Spooner from famed electro-group Fischerspooner and rapper/DJ Princess Superstar, along with fashion editors, stylists, boutique owners and bloggers.

"Fashion is made live on a person, using materials from a Balenciaga bag to a painting to a vintage garment to household items," Diehl says of the live events. "The people at the shows, they see what the designers can do with a garbage bag and they're like, 'My god, make me something!' "

House of Diehl also offers an opportunity for the masses to battle online at http://www.moli.com/stylewars. Potential warriors simply make an online profile and create an outfit using household products. Web surfers then vote on their favourites and winners receive a House of Diehl T-shirt and a $100 cash prize.

Fashion battles are also serious business for LVHRD (pronounced Live Hard, http://www.lvhrd.org), a members-only artsy collective that organizes fashion duels (or FSHNDLS), in which designers have an hour to create an outfit using a surprise material in front of a live audience.

The most recent FSHNDL, held in October at the swanky Midtown Loft club in New York, involved a plethora of outfits created, literally, from hundreds of pages of fashion magazines. (The designers must have known something was up when the invitation asked them to bring their favourite mags.)

True to the event's hip nature, partygoers, many clad in glamorous zombie costumes, posed for pouty portraits as designers worked feverishly. The winning ensemble was a sexy mini-dress with a fetching bow.

But these Project Runways for club kids aren't the only street fashion fights being fought. Thanks to Toronto-based Darryl Natale's second annual Streetclash (streetclash.blogspot.com), 23 international street style blogs recently battled each other to determine which city has the best looks.

"Toronto was out in the first round last year," Natale says of the online voting.

He also ran a concurrent live version of the Web contest - both ended last week, with Munich edging out Warsaw for the win - in a gallery in Berlin.

"People don't take street fashion as seriously as traditional designer lines, but street-fashion blogging has become really important for magazines and the industry in general," he says.

Others agree about the growing influence. "Most of the photos we take are of students who don't have a lot of money, so they have to be creative when they dress," says Marilis Cardinal, one of the Montreal bloggers behind Shut Up You Twit (pregnantgoldfish.wordpress.com).

"It's interesting to be able to put cities that are very rarely seen together in the same environment, and it's pretty funny when you decide who is the most fashionable - it's not necessarily the big cites that have fashion weeks that win. It's just cities where people wear interesting things."