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Milan Fashion Week, October 1995.
The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele is a shopping arcade. At one end is La Scala and at the other the Milan Duomo, the second largest church in Christendom. The galleria is no ordinary mall. It is to Burlington Arcade in London what Gianne Versace is to Jeff Banks. This is the biggest, most histrionic promenade in Italy. And this week, Milan Fashion Week, the world has come to see and be seen.

The old men of Milan, too, come here to talk, all year round. They move in little gaggles, very slowly with great gravitas. I sat and watched a group outside Prada, the handbag shop where you can on impulse buy a very thin, very discrete crocodile wallet for the price of an airline ticket to Sydney.

This year, ancient Italian men are wearing generously cut worsted suits, either with waistcoat or cardigan, in natural earth colours with muted checks. Ties are carelessly knotted and discreet, and collar sizes are too big for the neck. Hats are in, shoes are brown and highly polished, and elasticated clip-on braces seem to be making a comeback. The whole look is rather like Quasimodo Medici meets Jimmy Hoffa.

The show eddies and shimmers around these little islands of ruminating retired burghers. A crocodile of tiny matt-black Japanese girls files past, questing labels like polite, smiley soldier ants. German fashion editors in short skirts with bulldozer knees and steel-tipped blitzkrieg pumps hurry to their next show. Impossible tasteful New York editors carrying vast sea-snake Filofaxes try to look European, their hair as glossy as mink, cut in that dramatically understated I’ve-no-time-for-all-this, working-girl way that needs only two visits to the hairdresser a week.

Navigating down the middle of the walk is a woman who looks like an indecisive Ivana Trump who, because she was unable to make up her mind, decided to wear everything in the steamer trunk. She’s sweating and glowing because she’s pushing her daughter in a wheelchair. The girl is about 16, pretty and embarrassed. She has been dressed in an expensive silk two-piece suit with gold Chanel earrings, and a quilted bag hangs by a chain from the arm-rest. On her feet are black patent leather court shoes with clean soles. Her atrophied legs are swagged in black silk stockings. The skirt is very short. The elaborate lacy tops show against her white thighs. Her mother’s having difficulty getting the chair into Prada. The door is heavy and there are steps. The assistants with the Novocaine expressions watch without helping. Milan Fashion Week isn’t designed for the disabled. Not the physically disabled, anyway.

You can’t pick up a newspaper these days without thinking that the world has gone mad. Well, nothing will more convince you that the whole of western civilisation is utterly, howlingly, stark-staringly, foamingly doolally than the collection will. If they finished the shows with a grand catwalk parade of Naomi, Kate, Helena and Claudia wearing spangly straitjackets, I wouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised, and neither would the fashion editors. They would just go and blow a week’s rent on one and tell you to do the same.

I’ve never been to a fashion show before, but I’ve seen so many on television and in magazines that I thought I knew what they were like. No image can prepare you for the truly disturbing 3-D reality. First you get to a doorway in a side street that’s blocked with crash barriers and riot police and badly parked winking Mercedes with lounging, winking drivers. There’s a huge scrum of fashion victims all shouting and waving their hands, breaking off every so often to kiss each other and make foreplay noises. On the door are squads of camp couture Stasi in suits and hatchet-faced girls with long legs and lists.

When you’ve finally shoved your way in past a dozen impeccably rude bouncers there is a dark room with raised catwalk, a backdrop and ranks of tiny chairs. At the end of the catwalk there is a bank of photographers packed so tightly that their vast lenses mould into one and look like a single huge composite bluebottle eye. The smudgers and the camera crews argue and snap at each other like starlings on a town hall. A Stasi in a suit unceremoniously evicts the Korean gatecrasher who is in my chair. She looks unconcerned and moves down two seats.

In the gloaming I watch the audience scramble in, middle-aged women with puffy legs wearing tiny dresses, and see-through black silk shirts over cretonne bosoms propped up on bony rolling lacy corsets. Forty-something ladies with leather skin and leopard-fur hair the texture of guinea pigs’ beds stumble over the furniture because they’re too vain to take off their dark glasses in a room where you really need a torch. An ancient crone sits beside me. She’s got hands like carmine-tipped liver-spotted claws and her lips have so much collagen in them that her mouth won’t close properly.

If the women are bad, then the men are worse. The woman who is dressed ten years younger than her passport is sad but understandable. A balding American fashion editor with pigtail, a Johnny Depp beard, a paunchy male version of the Elizabeth Hurley dress, all safety pins down the side, and a cravat is beyond pity. Nobody looks normal, nobody here could walk down the aisle at Sainsbury without accompanying laughter. These are professional fashion watchers, men and women whose whole lives are dedicated to knowing what looks good, what is chic; they spend hours dressing models for photographs and then poring over the transparencies. You wonder what happens to their eyes when they look in the mirror. Fashion professionals don’t see things like you or I.

The whole room is a zebra pelt of black and white and that colour that has been the fashion staple for so long they’ve invented a dozen names for it – taupe, camel, fawn, buff. Frankly, it’s beige. Suzy Menkes hurries in and takes her seat, front and centre. She is the fashion correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and by the lights of the arcane pecking order of this bizarre business is accepted as the queen bee. Her hair looks as though she has forgotten to take out one of the curlers, but it’s not funny. It’s her personal fashion statement. The show can begin. Music, lights, models.

If the fashion writers look odd, they at least have recognisable human shapes. The models are from another planet. No photograph prepares you for the way they look in the absence of flesh. A photograph adds a stone to everybody’s image. These girls are fuse-wire thin and unbelievably tall. Their legs are like grissini, barely capable of taking the weight of their etiolated bodies. They move in an odd, careful, swaying way that is newborn and uncoordinated, like creatures who would be happier slithering on their tummies and have just been made to walk upright. Their shoulders look like universal spanners, their chests like xylophones, their tendoned necks sway and jerk their bony heads with ears that look like folded bats’ wings. They have glazed, sedated eyes, and the ones who don’t seem terrified look to me to be psychotic. Nobody normal could aspire to look this way.

The models teeter and sway down the catwalk, pause momentarily and say how many girls are in a collection because so many of them look the same. At the Dolce e Gabbana show I thought there were only eight girls. At the end, about 30 came out and clapped and took a bow. One who is instantly recognisable is Nadja Auermann, a terrifying-looking specimen with hair like the chrome bumper on a Chevy and eyes the colour of mineral water. She’s not the sort of person you want to meet in a dark alley. All the models have minders who run them from show to show on the back of scooters. Nadja looks as though she probably has a trainer and travels in a circus cage. The minute the show finishes there’s a smattering of applause from the plated claque and we all crowd for the door, ten steps behind Menkes whose bobbing quiff hits the street at a sprint.

This scenario is repeated every half-hour from nine in the morning to eight at night for five days. The models do it over and over again always late, always uncomfortable, shouted at, gay-manhandled, bullied and permanently starving. The top two or three might get a couple of thousand a show, but most of these poor creatures count their earnings in hundreds and a few free shirts. I stumbled out of my first collection feeling as if I’d taken part in something degrading. The closest thing I’d ever seen to this was a pub strip show. This is striptease for fetishists who want sexless girls to put clothes on. By the fourth show I was talking hem lengths and pastel shades with the best of them.

At lunch a shrill posse of London fashion editors are talking with blasé excitement over the mozzarella and rocket: “Oh my God, blusher’s back.” “And more corsets!” “Is smoking in again?” I ask whether they don’t think the models look, well, sort of strange. “Oh, yes, Helena’s got so fat. Did you see her tummy!” (Helena Christensen is about 5ft 11in. She’s reported to be size 6-ish.) Has the fact that so many of the design houses have been accused of fraud and bribery affected the shows? Six pairs of hard chic eyes stare at me uncomprehending. Am I mad? Versace, Armani and the rest are above the law; the law is for people who shop at Next. They could have accused Messrs Dolce and Gabbana of having dead puppies in their fridges, but they’d still have excellent tailoring and do wonderful things with ostrich feathers.

At night, after the shows, there’s dinner, and parties for those who’ve still got the energy. I went to the bash for 30 years of Italian Vogue in an architecturally fascist gallery. It was full of black and white and beige people, silly cocktail frocks worn with gumboots. I doubt if there was a room anywhere in the world that night with more titanically lusted-after people in it. It was so, so utterly sexless. Everyone looked as if, given the choice between a demon lover and the perfect handbag, they’d go for the bag. They were so bored, so miserable, so slidey-eyed and self-conscious. It was as if every invitation had come with an RSVP suicide note. This was one of the top ten industries in the world having a good time, letting its lacquered hair down, and I couldn’t fathom why it was all so joyless. Fashion is, after all, great fun; shopping is the second of life’s great pleasures. How come, here at the centre of it all, they’re bonkers and gloomy? We, you and I, wear clothes as outward and visible signs of our wardrobes, but here on the catwalk and in the Stygian auditoria, the clothes are the people. What’s outside is also what’s inside.

In the arcade, the small, solemn huddles of old men continue their peregrinations. “So, signor. I hear that blusher is back?” “Si, si, and more corsetry.” “More corsetry, you say, good, good.”

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