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ovation of a show featuring girls wearing only snorkels and gold lamé knickers, that it’s a big ‘let’s make fun of the non-fashion peasants’ conspiracy. But so far, everything I’ve seen has been disappointingly
wearable
.
4.35 p.m. British Fashion Council tent on the King’s Road: Gharani Strok
    Now this is much more like it. The atmosphere is very buzzy, dry ice swirling, people wandering around drinking mini-Moët bottles through straws and extreme seating disarray. And I’ve hit goody bag paydirt! A Phillo corsage, a Filofax, a Pucci-style make-up bag filled with I Coloniali products and – prize of prizes – two Krispy Kreme doughnuts, apparently one of the most addictive substances on the planet. At a promotion in Ohio, when they wouldn’t give a teenage boy any more free doughnuts (he’d already had about sixteen), he attacked the staff.
    The lights dim, Shaft-style seventies music starts and the first girl clopping down the catwalk is in a sliver of glitter and a pink hooker’s fur coat, followed by a girl in a bikini, a black fur coat and high knee boots. Mucho sparkly disco-wear and very Studio 54 – everything is slashed to the waist, front and back, and we see our first nipple of the day. Then our second. Then our third. It’s a veritable knocker-fest with dresses ‘accidentally’ sliding off shoulders and down to the waist and coats being worn with nothing underneath except knickers. Almost everything is totally unwearable –
exactly
what I’d been expecting.
    Afterwards, everyone is terribly sniffy about it. Someone says the clothes looked as though they’d been run up bystudents in some back room. All show and no substance, says someone else. Well, I thought, hugging my goody bag closer, I liked it.
6 p.m. The Mermaid Theatre, Blackfriars: Boudicca
    En route, I eat a Krispy Kreme and although extremely pleasing – delicious, in fact – it doesn’t plunge me into a week-long doughnut binge. Maybe after the Ohio incident they removed the addictive component?
    We’re now running an hour late, but never mind: I have high hopes for Boudicca. Alexander McQueen described them as ‘brave’. ‘Brave’ usually being a euphemism for ‘mental’.
    When they finally let us in the smell hits me: damp earth. The stage is covered in scrubby, muddy grass and weeds (all real); it smells like a sports day. Some of the seats are in the ‘field’ and as I watch fashion ladies get mired by their spiky heels in the mud, I fear for the models.
    And here we go! The first girl out looks as if she works with nuclear waste – wearing a baggy, black boiler-suit with a hood that covers her entire face, but in lovely floaty fabric: what Darth Vader might wear for a romantic dinner. Then comes a similar rig-out in white plastic with a beekeeper’s veil, followed by a hooded sou’wester and matching over-trousers – that a mackerel fisherman would wear in a Force 8 Gale – but in a purple, metallic see-through fabric. Next, a gorgeous white fur coat except that someone has taken green gaffer tape and wound it round and round the girl’s shoulders and upper body. Post-
Apocalypse
headbands, French Foreign Legion hats, Lawrence of Arabia veils, lots of glaring faces – when you can see them – and Swampy hair: very warrior girl. Clothes that will have people stuttering in disgust, ‘AndI’m meant to wear that to Sainsbury’s, am I?’ But it’s affecting and exciting and if it’s toned down a little (a lot?) you wouldn’t be laughed at in the street.
7.25 p.m. British Fashion Council tent on the King’s Road: Clements Ribeiro
    Finally get to the bottom of the models’ silly walk – it’s so their legs will look thin for the photographers. Well, that makes sense because they look like tree-trunks ordinarily. Er…
    As soon as they start picking their ridiculous way down the catwalk, I’m in an agony of longing. A model with plaits swirled around her ears like two Danish pastries passes in a