Dylan Jones: How much longer for the winter collection?

As the international fashion industry tucked into its high-fibre breakfast in Milan last Wednesday, in the Bulgari, the Hyatt, the Four Seasons and the Principe, all its attendant members would have opened their free copy of the International Herald Tribune (that comes in its own fantastically environmentally unfriendly plastic bag), perhaps to skim Suzy Menkes' reviews of the autumn/winter 2007 menswear collections, or to read another columnist who thinks that Nicolas Sarkozy has gone all soft and soggy in the centre.

But it's unlikely that they would have got to page 11, where they would have seen the usual catwalk photographs of heavily made-up Day-Glo spacemen, Mongoloid bombardiers and 23rd-century infantrymen. Or, indeed, to page 16 ("The Sarkozy Chocolate: Soft on the outside, Hard at the kernel", for instance), preferring to focus instead on a truly scary composite photograph of one of Greenland's melting glaciers, bang in the middle of the front page. "Greenland's ice cap is melting so fast that mapmakers cannot keep up with islands as they are uncovered," read the alarming caption.

And, while I realise that, these days, stories such as this pop up like photographs of Pete Doherty covered in his own blood, it made me wonder how long we will be seeing heavy, fur-lined overcoats in designers' winter collections. Indeed, how long we will be encouraged to buy hats, gloves, scarves, boots and earmuffs, and all the other fashion paraphernalia associated with the darker, shorter months.

Yes, I know that our peregrinations will increasingly be blessed with flash storms and freakish sub-zero temperatures, but the weather then will be so inhospitable that most of us who have any choice will probably decide not to go out at all (and even if we do, we'll just throw on that old coat we've had for years, the one stuffed at the back of the downstairs cupboard, along with the wellingtons, unused golf clubs, old copy of Yellow Pages and fold-up barbecue). Let's face it, the world is burning up and we'll all soon be wearing swimming trunks to work.

Milan was so unusually warm that hardly anyone was wearing a coat. And there were hardly any on the runway either, with most designers deciding to send out yet another biker jacket or "reinvented" pea coat. The overcoats we did see looked strangely anachronistic, vestiges of a bygone era when there wasn't such a thing as central heating, let alone global warming.

All the smart money these days is buying land in Scandinavia (it's the new Riviera!), planting vineyards in Warwickshire, and dumping any shares it might have in anything remotely resembling a European ski resort. So, the situation is as follows: New boots and panties, yes. All fur coat and no knickers, non di uno.

Dylan Jones is the editor of GQ

d.jones@independent.co.uk