By Arthur Smith The Guardian
It is London fashion week, and once again I haven't been invited to any shows. This is upsetting given my well-known love of fashion, or, as I think of it, playing with the dressing-up box. Obviously I am not bothered about men's fashion - is anyone, apart from Jonathan Ross? Heterosexual men who are obsessed with their clothes and looks tend to turn women off and bore fellow blokes. The sight of the dark-haired ginger chap on the last Big Brother endlessly touching up his coiffure like some follicle fetishist was extremely distasteful.
Women's fashion, however, exists partly in order to titillate men, and in that respect I am as other men. The sight of women parading up and down in experimental thongs and high heels should probably enrage my inner feminist, but I'm afraid it does not, which is why I occasionally find myself switching my big TV to channel 220, the home of Fashion TV.
The station is on 24 hours a day and 90% of the time runs fashion shows from around the world. This seems incredible to me: the edited events only seem to last about three minutes, which suggests that every day of the year, four or five hundred catwalk shows are taking place. It makes me wonder how many combinations there can be of small bits of coloured cloth. Many more than I can imagine, obviously. I saw an article in a magazine entitled "Autumn Fashion - 185 must-haves". Bloody hell, it must be expensive and exhausting being a fashionable woman.
A female friend who caught me watching Fashion TV reckons its audience is largely made up of slobbering men who are just taking a break from the appalling Men & Motors channel. I don't agree. I tell her it is just a way of dropping into an Italian passeggiata whenever you feel like it. Or you can perceive it as some Beckettian otherworld where streams of unidentified people walk up and down endlessly and pointlessly, to a light house beat. The female friend, whom I have in fact invented, snorts derisively.
The outfits come and go but there is a constant that I like about the catwalk model: the snotty expression. That allows me to quote a line from an American stand-up I once heard, for which I have long been trying to find a home. The comic had spent a week at a model school, where she was instructed that, in order to cultivate the right attitude for haute couture shows, she had to think: "If you can afford this, you're too fat to wear it, bitch."