Fashion

I can see one now. (They’re hard to miss.) Face the colour of mayonnaise, Gameboy dangling from one ear, gerbils for shoes, an alpaca for a hat, glasses the size of a window frame. It’s what we call in the profession an arse. Don’t mock him. Hold that snigger. He may be an arse, but he’s a important arse. A vital member of our community. An engine room of creativity. Future fashion norms – norms that you and I will take for granted – will be developed and stabilised by this sad, desperate, sex-starved arse. Like Jesus, their sacrifice is for mankind. Ridiculed, jeered at, shunned, they must forgo the

The most extraordinary thing about the scandal of Unite at Grangemouth and in Falkirk is how long it took the outside world to notice. Partly, this is an effect of devolution: almost nothing Scottish is now considered news in London, even if it is of kingdom-wide importance. Partly, it results from the loss of media and political attention to trade union affairs. So successful was Mrs Thatcher in taming union political power that newspapers laid off the labour correspondents who, in the 1970s and early 1980s, had been the aristocrats of the news room. As for the Tories, they have forgotten the Cold War arts of keeping dossiers on subversion.

Marketing types are desperately jostling for a piece of the action at London Fashion Week, which starts at the end of the month. Take an irony-free press release trying to flog ice cream off the backs of catwalk models. This is not any old ice cream but ‘the world’s first protein ice cream’, inspiringly called ‘Wheyhey’. The blurbers say that Wheyhey ‘will be keeping sweet-toothed models and fashionistas satisfied’. Given that it apparently contains no fat, no sugar and the same amount of protein as a small chicken breast, Mr S has his doubts about that. Most of these ‘sweet-toothed’ yet stick-thin models could do with a box of Krispy Kremes;

Is this the end of business attire? The slow degradation of the standard issue suit has reached the Institute of Directors — the Pall Mall-based bastion of all things business. Its website says that members should ‘make the decision on what they would normally wear to do business, as long as it is not deemed indecent.’ So, what does that mean? ‘Members will be permitted to wear jeans, T-shirts, shorts and all variants of footwear. There is a very mixed view about the dress code and this will be for a trial period of 3 months.’ The trial is advanced: my mole says that there have been at least seven

Topless men. What does that mean, then? I was opposite one on the tube the other day, heading north from Finsbury Park, and I just couldn’t stop -staring. In terms of sheer comfort, I was quite jealous. There was me, sweating in my shirt and suit trousers, and there was him, open to the air in shorts and nothing else. He was sweating too, of course. As I watched, a rivulet of the stuff ran from his neck and through the thicket of his chest to hang as a globule from a thatch of hair above his right nipple. Frankly, that globule made me anxious. Any moment, I knew, our train

Forget the hacks and starlets, the politicians and media moguls, the defining image of the Leveson Inquiry will always be phone-hacking lawyer Mark Lewis’ terrible orange overcoat. The Zara number got inquiry wags and watchers talking and now I hear the coat is about to take a starring role of its very own. Lewis, who suffers from MS, tells me that he will be auctioning the coat for a charity associated with the disease. Form an orderly queue.