The desperation of the fashion world

I want to weep when they make women walk down a catwalk in tiny shorts with suspenders

Three cheers for dress designer Betty Jackson who told radio listeners yesterday: "I'm not 5ft 11in or a size 10, I've got a large bottom and so I understand what women want to wear". Yes, yes, yes, I felt like shouting out! Here is a successful fashion entrepreneur happy to admit she comes up with garments that fit and flatter her customers.

Fashion is joyous, uplifting, and fun. We get some of our biggest thrills sinking our hard-earned cash on a new piece of clothing - it's better than any drug. But if you have any interest in the industry at all, the last few days must have been thoroughly dispiriting, a parade of schizophrenic imagery (pin-up girls in tiny knickers followed by stick insects in prim pleats) which signals that British Fashion Week is in full swing. Even though most of our successful designers show their collections to buyers abroad, the British Fashion Council continues to claim that their event is a huge hit with buyers and exhibitors. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them give us a miss next time around.

First of all, it's worth dispelling a few myths perpetuated by fashion editors - according to one newspaper this week brown is the new black, whereas another tells me lavender is the new pink. When reading about fashion, you have to understand that few of the people who write about it, with very rare exceptions (our own Susannah Frankel and Suzy Menkes of the Herald Tribune) can write at all.

They live in an inward-looking bubble so tiny and precious it makes the world of Edina and Patsy look like something off the Discovery Channel. Fashion Editors have no sense of the real world, rarely meet real people and resent paying the full retail price for their clothes. They get free designer samples which never go into production, massive discounts, vats of free champagne and invites to endless parties. Even I, at 57, hardly the Jodie Kidd of style journalism, could have attended up to ten of these mind-numbing events on any day this week.

My era as a fashion reporter ended in 1971, and since then I have been content to be a consumer, although I once commissioned a series about the business behind fashion, The Look, for the BBC. So I know that the world of fashion journalism is slightly more prestigious than photographing the next Littlewoods catalogue, but not much.

How many times have you looked at a fashion picture in a newspaper or magazine and thought "is this a joke?" as we are treated to hilarious concepts like £300 tweed gaiters, £650 rubber cropped jackets that end just below your armpits, or see-through nylon coats trimmed with mink, with that telling adjective, "directional". Only yesterday one fashion guru pronounced authoritatively that "spats are back".

So it is as a knowledgeable shopper that I throw my hands up in disgust at what is being shown to buyers this week in the name of British fashion. When Giles Deacon makes women walk down the catwalk in tiny shorts with suspenders attached, I want to weep. It's not even mildly entertaining. If Jasper Conran thinks that knickers your bum drops out of are worth taking seriously, I just laugh. It's not fun or shocking, it smacks of desperation.

Fashion designers can't decide whether we should dress like junior versions of the queen in pussycat bows and knee length pleated skirts - totally unflattering to anyone fatter than a broomstick - or squeeze into the bondage gear and pretend we're whores. There are young designers like Sophia Kokosalaki who truly have an original and interesting take on fashion, but they are in the minority.

If you go into any major department store you will find barely half a dozen garments on sale by most of those touted this week as the Next Big Thing. Most of the outfits photographed in the press are only ever stocked up to a size 14, and then in miniscule numbers in tiny shops in London. Then there's this arcane idea that we should wear entirely different clothes for spring and summer as opposed to autumn and winter - has no one noticed the weather recently?

Until the fashion press takes their industry seriously, and until store buyers recognise that most women are not of Twiglet proportions, most of us are condemned to buying clothes over the internet or using the world's best fashion advisors - a Best Friend - the next time we seek to add to our wardrobes.

Fashion magazines are like top-shelf-porn, providing over-priced quick thrills of no lasting value. In London we have excellent colleges with well-respected design courses. The trouble is, ideas are easy. What's hard is understanding the constrictions of the real world, the demands of the mass market, the practical needs of all women who go to work and travel on public transport. These are women who won't find the idea of dresses slashed to the waist quite the thing for the school run, or even the company cocktail party.

Most of the clothes you are seeing this week will never be made. They will be endlessly loaned out to Kylie, Beyonce, Dido and Scarlett, will be strutted up and down red carpets in Los Angeles, New York, Cannes and Venice and will end up smelling slightly sweaty on a hanger in the back of a designer's studio when the whole charade starts all over again in the autumn. Welcome to the real world of high fashion.