“Work. Eyes. No question,” etc, etc.

Which might sound unedifying, even tawdry – but you should hear the second row, which is normally occupied by fashion directors and editors of lesser magazines. (Rule one at the collections: if you think you’re front row, never, ever accept a second-row seat; people will notice and you’ll sit there for ever more. Which led to one high priestess of fashion [second row] – sadly no longer with us – hovering by the front row at each show till the lights went down, when she would dive in beside us and wriggle her bottom along until she got her seat.) Of course, fashion directors always know more about fashion than editors-in-chief (who have a whole magazine to get out), and so the FDs’ critiques can have more edge. But then there’s the third row, typically comprising stylists who literally know the industry inside out, who get paid a pittance and stay in fleapit hotels miles from the FDs’ and eds’ five-star accommodation, and tolerate it because fashion is their vocation; and so on, right back to the fashion students standing at the back who try to steal the gifts left on the front-row seats.

Which might make you think the fashion world is a jungle, but the metaphor I always prefer is an exotic reef: breathtakingly beautiful, astonishing, almost silent and alien, populated by weirdly shaped, wonderful beings, by ugly rock-dwellers and a few octopuses, but also by multihued, ethereally delicate creatures who can exist only here. Normal human beings can only live temporarily here, artificially – like heterosexual men, for example, who stand out like, well, a frogman in flippers at a fashion show. It is another world, and if its denizens attack each other, or prey on lesser beings, or function as parasites, or occasionally cruise serenely overhead, like leviathans, appearing never to eat but taking everything in, it’s a milieu where you can spend ten years on the front row and never quite be accepted as an über-fashionista. Although, around my 14th collections, maybe 300 must-see shows later (an editor-in-chief never does the small ones), I noticed that, in the fashion bus afterwards, the FDs began obliquely to solicit my opinion on a more than usually directional Zac Posen show.

Meanwhile, the stylist who critiqued my fishnets now works in a pub. In Kent. After being promoted, she had a breakdown involving huge debts (shoes, coats) and alcohol. At one point, she was living in a hostel for the homeless, where she was visited by one person who works in fashion – and me. Fashion never cares for the ill, the weak, the old: it’s strictly about the beautiful.