Ladies, ladies – we need to have a conversation about shoes. It’s long overdue, to be frank, although the issue is a simple one: WE NEED TO STOP BUYING SHOES THAT HURT. Pinchy, pointy, needle-heeled shoes are NO GOOD! They are a NEGATIVE INVENTION! They’re not fit for purpose!

When women buy shoes and gigglingly say, “Of course, they’re agony – I’m just going to have to sit on a bar stool all night, and be helped to the toilet by friends, or passers-by,” it sounds as OUTRIGHT INSANE as going, “I’ve just bought a house – it doesn’t have a roof, of course, so I’m just going to sit in the front room with an umbrella up.”

Womankind must be prepared to take MILITANT ACTION against the shoe designers of the world and their escalatingly ridiculous products. Because, otherwise, all “The New Fashion Trends for spring/summer 2010” really means is, “Chicks – your feet are going to END UP LIKE MINCE.”

All the shoes I wore for this piece were unbelievably painful. The make-up artist and the hairstylists had to stand on either side of me, and prop me up, as I walked from the dressing room to the studio floor – like it was Vietnam, and I’d been shot.

“I bet proper models can walk around in these, and leap up and down and everything,” I said, gloomily.

“No,” said the stylists, briskly. “They fall over all the time.”

Take some shoe-boots from Versace. Every time I tried to stand on one leg, I slowly keeled over sideways – like a sad, fashionable tree being felled. And the Versace shoes were the comfortable shoes. The Gucci pair were so agonisingly difficult to balance in, the soles of my feet were numb two days later. I can’t even bring myself to discuss the Frankie Morello boots – I caught sight of myself walking in them at one point, and I was moving like Tina Turner trying to carry an egg in her pants. I did not look elegant. I looked… elephant.

I don’t blame the designers of these shoes. They must be confused. “Look!” they will say, in their French or Italian accents. “We ’ave just made a shoe that is completely unuseable! The heel is shaped like a six-inch Curly Wurly, and zer toes are so pointy, you will simply ’ave to CUT OFF two toes! Yet the women – they are loving this shoe! They are delighted to pay £600 for it! They are putting their names on waiting lists for it!” Shrug. “We will simply ’ave to carry on.”

So come on, ladies! Stop confusing poor, bloody Manolo Blahnik and, erm, Mr Gucci Shoe! Just refuse to buy any shoe in which you can neither dance to Bad Romance nor run away from a murderer. A shoe should, surely, not make you boring or dead. Not for £600. WE NEED TO GO ON STRIKE FOR SHOES THAT ARE BEAUTIFUL, BUT ALSO ACTUALLY USEABLE AS SHOES.

Because, once you get past the fact that nearly all the shoes for next year are agony – like, seriously, your options are either a) morphine or b) flip-flops – all the coming trends are quite jolly, really. There’s no terribly bad news: waistlines on jeans remain comfortably high, dresses aren’t going too short, the great evil of bodycon seems to be over, and everyone has learnt from the Great Neon/Fluoro Disaster of 2003, and is still keeping away from the lime green and migraine orange. Instead, spring/summer 2010 is a cheering combination of things that make you feel hot with things that make you want to laugh raucously, and go, “Haha seriously? Amazing. My drunk gay friends will LOVE me in this s***.”

Here I am most obviously discussing the tights, which rapidly came to be known, during the shoot, as either “the giraffe tights” or – by the straight men in the room – “the scab tights”. It seems the most noticeable thing about spring/summer 2010 is that legs are going to become funny. Insanely patterned, brightly coloured leggings that appear to have been inspired by Su Pollard; tights with things stuck all over them – when the weather changes, legs are going nuts. If you were thinking about keeping your legs serious, you are OVAH.

Of course, fashion is not referring to this as “the funny legs look”. Technically it’s referred to as “optical and kaleidoscopic”, not “ROFLpins.com”. Worn in conjunction with a similarly “non-shy” tunic, the effect is instantly to make you want to go to a rave, neck huge amounts of Ecstasy and drink orange squash while shouting, “PLAY GROOVE IS IN THE HEART ON A TINY TOY PIANO, PLEASE!”

You’d have to feel pretty ebullient to wear this gear. I am vexingly ebullient most of the time – I have a tiny top hat I have worn, on occasion, to Budgens – but even I would worry about wearing this stuff in the daytime. It would take a lot of energy to front – mainly because, once in the outfit, you feel obliged to look upbeat, alive to life’s manifold possibilities, at all times. If someone cut you up in traffic while you were wearing this outfit, thus rendering you angry and disgruntled, suddenly, your face would no longer “go” with your outfit. And, obviously, being dumped while you have clown legs and a Play School top on would increase the agony by 6,000 per cent – like getting the news that your father has died, but on a novelty phone that’s shaped like a hot dog.

On top of this, one must calculate if one’s legs are already “funny enough” without the tights. There’s a reason why the fashion team have lashed me into those agonising Gucci shoes. It’s because without their 4in heels, my legs – which do look just a little bit like Porkinson’s bangers, God bless them – suddenly looked like Porkinson’s bangers that had been decorated with stickers by a mad child.

Let’s be honest here: “funny legs” is one of those fashion things that work by way of testing how innately hot you are. If you are a sizzling piece of ass, you can take your legs appearing to be having a nervous breakdown, and still look foxy. If you want clothes that “help” you, you will find these tights are a bad friend. But if I am ever invited to a party by the Scissor Sisters where I know someone’s got MDMA cakes, and someone can carry me around all night in a sedan chair, I’ll be right back into the outfit like a shot.

Similarly enervating in terms of “fronting” was the Eighties look. I had a small, weepy nervous breakdown in that dress – not least because it was a size zero, and behind the “glamorous” façade you see in the picture is a load of string and safety pins holding the thing on me. Round the back, I look like a really slovenly student’s backpack. I practically had a bedroll and a tin cup hanging off my arse.

Apparently, this outfit is a “nod to early Eighties high-fashion dresses” – for this summer, we have the option of going totally Alexis Carrington Colby! Personally, I am pro any element of life where I can be more like Alexis Carrington Colby – this is a woman who seduced billionaire Cecil Colby with a fag in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other. She couldn’t be more of a legend if she tried.

But this outfit seemed to miss the point of being Alexis – which is that the woman always looked wholly comfortable in her own skin. Even when punching Krystle in the face in a lily pond. Her clothes gave her sex and power. My outfit, on the other hand, took away around 60 per cent of my power-sex feelings, and you know why? Because it’s got NO SLEEVES.

I tell you, there is little more in this world that makes me ANGRIER than dresses with no sleeves. Nearly ALL dresses have no sleeves! And yet nearly ALL women WANT sleeves. I sometimes think that 98 per cent of female neuroses could simply be eradicated by making it ILLEGAL to sell sleeveless dresses. ILLEGAL. One day, I’m going to open a business that sells sleeves – just sleeves – on the internet, to be stitched on to sleeveless but otherwise perfect dresses.

As for the other trends, though – hurrah! They’re all, by and large, on the side of righteousness. Underwear as outerwear is, for anyone raised on either a) Goth, b) Riot Grrrl or c) Madonna, simply the return of an old friend. At 18, during a year-long phase of Gothic Victoriana, I had a red and black corset that pushed my bosoms up into what can only be referred to as “a tit arse”. For the delectation of regulars at the Good Mixer in Camden, I would often insert a Cadbury’s Fudge into its centre, and prove that I could eat it without using my hands. Oh, yes – underwear as outerwear and I are old friends.

In 2010, however, both underwear as outerwear and I are classier. It’s all “vintage silk camiknickers over tights”, properly boned corsets and visible stocking-tops. One of the looks we messed around with included big Rigby & Peller satin pants with ruffles up the back – an item so breathtakingly beautiful you could imagine getting married wearing nothing but them and a veil.

The outfit we ended up with – corset and khaki trousers with, of course, an agonising pair of shoes – I did not love so much. Sitting down it looked pretty darn hot. Standing up, however, the proportions were all wrong – the tight discipline of the corset contrasted badly with the billowing cloud banks of my arse. “Standing” and “sitting bolt upright” were the only two positions I could assume, by the way. Bending over in a corset is impossible. It’s great for your general posture, but ruinous if you drop a tenner on the floor.

But the 2010 promotion of underwear is going to be saucy fun. I’ve already decided I’m going to do some Second World War-era combi-style cami with a denim skirt, jacket and boots. And carry those Rigby & Peller knickers around in my handbag, to show everyone.

Me in a pink coat is the “new neutrals” trend. Burberry Prorsum went all-out with this look on the catwalk – all ruffles, chiffons and blossom-coloured girl demurery. Perhaps it was the relief of being fully clothed again after the corset shoot, but I loved this look: ostensibly “good”, but also, let’s face it, based on the colour of skin – thus making it look a tantalising bit like I’m wearing a mac made of nudeness.

I suspect I would have to temporarily become a different person to “do” these sorbet colours properly: it’s not a look in which one can smoke a fag, drink whisky in an old-man pub, or climb over some railings at 2am. But then, I like outfits so powerful they turn you into a different person. The only problem is if other people don’t get who it is you’ve turned into.

“Oh, you look very Hepburn in that,” said one of the men at the shoot. I think I made a small growling sound. I HATE Audrey Hepburn. It makes me FURIOUS when people go on about how modern women should have more of Hepburn’s reserve, poise and grace – and then quack on about Breakfast at Tiffany’s: in which she plays A DEPRESSIVE PROSTITUTE ALONE WITH HER CAT. Yeah – that’s one role model I can do without, thanks.

As for safari – the leopard skin and attitude – I bloody loved that outfit. It was a no-brainer. Around 50 per cent of my wardrobe is leopard skin, anyway – I like its cheerful overtones of both barmaid and stuffed toy animal: their Venn diagram intersection is what I call “my core being”.

Teamed with big hair and, obviously, a pair of boots that weren’t agonisingly painful, I would have walked straight out of the photographer’s studio and into work/the pub/the witness box of a high-profile murder trial on EastEnders in that. That outfit was me, but newer, and better. And that’s what – when it works – fashion is supposed to be.

Well, that, and what truly separates us from the apes – who’ve just never thought of zazzing up an outfit with a knotted belt and a contrasty, clashy-clashy tote bag. Idiots.