Fashion show idea

"Fashion is an element mysterious as uranium and just as explosive, but light - lighter than air" - Carmel Snow, one of the greatest editors of America's Harper's Bazaar.

"Brown," said the Telegraph's Hilary Alexander on TV a few weeks ago, "is the new black." But she was already behind the times. A friend of mine had just returned from New York with a breathless dispatch from fashion's front line. "Navy blue," he announced, "is next year's brown."

Fashion people can say this kind of thing without laughing, because they really mean it. The late Diana Vreeland, American Vogue's most imperious editor, started this particular line of thought with her famous declaration that "Pink is the navy blue of India." In no other field of journalism could writers get away with peddling variations on essentially the same line for 40 years, but then people who write about designer frocks don't live in the same world as the rest of us. They float, somewhere above the clouds, on Planet Fashion.

On Planet Fashion, very few clothes come in blue, red, cream, pink or yellow. Instead they are sapphire, crimson, ivory, rose or saffron. A jacket can be clever, witty, ironic, sexy, aggressive, feminine or masculine - it can even be all of these things at the same time. In the past few weeks we have been told that the clothes from next year's spring/summer collections could have been worn by a Jane Austen heroine, by a young Bianca Jagger or by Morticia Adams. They harked back to the seventies, but were also futuristic. Some were aimed at women who work, but others at ladies who lunch. Trousers were boot-cut, dresses bias-cut. Pretty is back, but then so is severe tailoring. London is hip (again). Armani is sniping at Versace (again). By making his models splash through a paddling pool and by exposing their bum cracks for the world to see, the new grit-frock star Alexander McQueen was creating a "fashion moment".

What this froth of words tries to hide is that fashion is, essentially, cyclical. Hemlines go up and down. Colours, fabrics and finishes flash in and out of favour. Old styles are revived, then discarded. Glamour is generally followed by some kind of dressing down, minimalism by frills, muted colours by loud prints. Yet fundamentally, clothes haven't changed that much in the past 50 years. New materials are constantly being discovered, of course, but on the whole it's the big sportswear companies such as Nike that spend a fortune on researching and developing these, not the fashion houses.

If you're a fashion editor, though, you can't tell your readers that pastel shades are back again, just as they were three years ago and four years before that. You have to pretend that this is new, fresh, exciting. That jumpers have never been seen in these colours before. That jumpers in these colours will, in fact, change your life. We all know this is nonsense: fashion is about built-in obsolescence, about making us buy new clothes before the old ones wear out. But we enjoy it anyway - it's a lot of fun. The problem for journalists is that it is primarily a visual medium, and the real creativity in its coverage is by photographers and stylists. Words inevitably let it down.

Whether you dress from jumble sales or designer boutiques, fashion is about pleasure, about self-expression. Ultimately, it is about fantasy, and like all fantasies, if you pick at it closely, it unravels. Two years ago Tina Brown dedicated a whole issue of the New Yorker to the subject of fashion. Interrogated by sharp journalists rather than fashion editors writing fawning copy in exchange for exclusive previews of their new collections, almost every designer interviewed ended up admitting that most of what he said about fashion was meaningless. By its very nature fashion is obsessed with trivia, with details, with ephemera. When good writers were given serious space in which to dissect the subject, it fell apart.

There are other factors controlling the coverage of designer clothes. Planet Fashion is a seductive place. Twice a year, journalists fly from New York to London to Milan then Paris to view the ready-to-wear collections, with the couture shows in between. There are lavish parties, select dinners for the elite at the designers' palatial homes, with endless flowers, gifts and freebies, plus the chance to mingle with the models and sit near the celebrities at the shows.

But it is also a business in which sensitivities are high. If an editor forgets to send flowers after a show, tantrums ensue. If a designer feels slighted, access to clothes for editorial shoots can be denied and the transgressors may find themselves banished to the back of the shows, or even barred altogether. This kind of thing matters on Planet Fashion, where status is all. The seating plans at shows are as carefully negotiated as a Middle East peace plan, and just as liable to change.

Which is why, at the shows, you'll find fashion photographers, editors, directors, stylists, students, but you won't find fashion critics Faced with a bad collection, most writers resort to a kind of code: you may be told that a collection is experimental (de, it's insane), challenging (unwearable), conservative (boring), or that it's not the designer's best, but you'll hardly ever be told it's plain awful. If they want bite in their copy, most magazines send a representative from the real world - Elle recently had the novelist Joseph O'Connor report from Paris, while Vogue sent the comedienne Ruby Wax to the last couture collections.

For magazines there is also the question of advertising. During my time as editor of The Face magazine, a flippant phrase about a designer's perfume in a short caption led to our losing double-page ads from his company for years, a loss of revenue that added up to tens of thousands of pounds. Fashion titles rely on such money to survive, and a tiff with a big-name designer could cost them a small fortune. British magazines are far less compliant than their European counterparts in this, but still there is often subtle pressure for editors to cut a barbed remark, to feature big-spending labels more than others who don't or can't afford to advertise.

Newspapers, which don't rely on ads for perfume and clothes, could, in theory, be more objective. But they are just as addicted to their fashion fix and just as afraid of losing it. With the broadsheets necessarily becoming as much about entertainment as about news, fashion adds a respectable shot of glamour, and so they need their seats in the front row as much as Harper's or Vogue.

It should also be noted that fashion magazines have a long tradition of making space for quality writing on subjects other than frocks. British Vogue is currently one of the most intelligent women's monthlies exactly because its sales rely on its fashion image, not on lurid coverlines promising sex and ever more freakish true-life confessions.

It's also easy for people from the real world to get the wrong idea about Planet Fashion. The catwalk is about theatre. If you've ever looked at the pictures and wondered how real women are supposed to wear such clothes, the answer is they aren't. The outfits that most often catch the cameras' attention at the shows are often not even put into production; they are there simply to make a statement, to snatch as much editorial coverage as possible for the designer. Even the clothes that do make the shops are often adapted: skimpy skirts will be longer, tight dresses cut more generously than the ones worn on the catwalk by impossibly proportioned models.

The truth is that most labels have a few best-selling items that they show, in modified forms, season after season. A crisp white shirt, a good suit, a little black dress, a well-cut coat - this is what most customers want. But in order to make them want your own particular version of it, you have to sell them a fantasy, give the press something more exciting to write about. Hence the see-through tops, the comical outfits, the men's suits in unfeasibly bright flowered fabric, Alexander McQueen's paddling pool, and every designer's need to court the big-name models and celebrities.

No label could buy the kind of publicity Vivienne Westwood enjoyed when Naomi Campbell took a tumble from those absurd shoes. It made the front page of every paper, even News at Ten. I once asked Naomi if the fall tad done her career any harm, and she just laughed, telling me that many a designer since had asked - only half-joking - whether she couldn't do the same for them.

Nowhere is this quest for coverage more clear than in the couture shows, a twice yearly exercise in which journalists dutifully report on clothes that only a handful of women in the world will ever get to wear. Such garments are made by hand to fit the women who ordered them, and cost upwards of 15,000 [pounds] for a single outfit. Demand is dwindling, and few of the couture houses make money any more.