I love the world of fashion. I’m very very fashionable, exceedingly stylish and so beautiful I’m often mistaken for Cara Delevine when I’m in McDonalds. And although fashions change every season, every year, all the time, I adopt the ‘stopped watch’ approach to what’s trendy. In that a stopped watch tells the right time twice a day, so I wear Levis and t-shirts and every decade or so I’m bang-on with the trend. The rest of the time, quite frankly, I don’t give a shit. Ok, I could go out and buy a bright yellow 3-piece suit with short trousers and the waistcoat in puce, and be totally fucking Shoreditch, with accompanying fluorescent green Doc Marten high-tops and a Pharrell Williams 10-gallon hat but it will be out of fashion by next weekend by which time Mel will have left me on the grounds that “you look like a total tosser and actually cause my stomach to turn”. And who could blame her? Plus we’d be about 3 grand poorer for the effort. High fashion ain’t cheap. Which is probably the main reason I never, ever, voluntarily enter a shopping centre without great duress.

But its London fashion week, so make a bleedin’ effort, will ya? And I know this because when I walk past Somerset House on the Strand on my way home the pavement is even more crowded than usual. Vans and lorries are blocking up the traffic as they are unloaded, not by burly Scotsmen in boiler suits (how 1970s is that???), but by effeminate and androgynous creatures in Stella McCartney, mincing their way under the weight of big boxes of stuff. And although the street is insanely packed with bodies, its not actually hard to get past. I don’t say that in a Lawrence Dellaglio kind of, shoulder barge, head down, press on kind of way, but you just glide through. Because a street full of apparent anorexics simply doesn’t occupy the same volume of space as a street full of normal people. And I don’t know if this crew of 6 foot 2 girls with 13-inch waists all taking photos of each other on smart phones (before they disappear altogether, perhaps) are models, design students, trainee lampposts or what, but they are quite gorgeous. But so painfully skinny, all of them, that, and I say this with no degree of sexism or objectification, they don’t have a pair of tits between the lot of ’em.

Yet in a way I love fashion, skinny birds aside. Because although the ‘new midi length skirt’ will not stop ISIS, and Putin is still Putin however ridiculously he may choose to dress, clothes are a celebration of the most superficial layer of all of us (ok, naturists aside). They are your costume, your disguise, your elected role for the day. You wouldn’t wear jeans to visit the Queen (well, I might, but you wouldn’t) and you wouldn’t wear a tuxedo to play football, even if you could well afford it on 200k a week wages. And in a world beset by major problems, we need the ridiculous, we need the stupid, we need to irrelevantly superficial and pointless just as a counterpoint to all the dross that we’d otherwise drown in.

Happy fashionable Wednesday

A xxxx