I was looking forward to going to London Fashion Week for the first time, I really was. I had seen the Robert Altman movie Pret a Porter. I had taken a subscription to Vogue. I had staged catwalk shows featuring a heady cocktail of Start-Rites and ballet tights in my sitting room since the age of seven. I was dying to get to London but it wasn't just the clothes on the models that interested me. I wanted to check out the fash pack - the front rows filled with fashion editors all in black, the manicured buyers from Manhattan and Tokyo, the moody photographers with cheekbones, shouting at the girls.
I imagined it as a chaotic world of egos, noise, colour, fleeting enthusiasms, and trivial passions. I even put a lot of thought into whether I should acquire an eccentricity of my own for the week, to make me fit in with such an eclectic lot. Should I, for example, make a habit of noisily eating sardine sandwiches in the front row of all the shows while loudly proclaiming that bad breath was the new fresh breath? A friend in New York, who knows about these things, suggested strapping a pair of miniature poodles to some exceedingly large and fluffy moonboots and appearing oblivious to the noise at all times.
In the end I settled for a hefty dose of black and hoped the assembled glitterati would be collectively impressed by an array of coloured tights and some cheeky Oxfam purchases trying to pass themselves off as posh. I was prepared to be an outsider but was, rather arrogantly, convinced nobody would be able to withstand the combination of my Irish charm and my brass neck (so very this season) for long.
How wrong could I have been? When I finally crept on to the plane home, I was a different fashion victim to the one who set out; a mere pale-dove-grey shadow of my former self. I was bowed, I was broken, but above all, I was bored. It wasn't the shows that had me in such a state of ennui - at this level, fashion is a spectacle, a piece of theatre with flashing lights, spooky makeup and the exciting possibility somebody's five-inch heels will break at any moment. It's not rocket science, but anybody who likes the circus or nightclubs or those Japanese game shows where they make people eat worms couldn't help but be excited by a London fashion show.
But the catwalks were the only place excitement could be found. Everything and everybody else was infected through and through with a tremendous malaise. Instead of witnessing colourful encounters between batty but brilliant fashion mavens, I heard endless discussions about where one could find a taxi. Coming out of Hussein Chalayan's show, in which four models had constructed their own dresses, on stage, out of chair covers and another had turned a table into a skirt, I expected to hear an excited babble of discussion about the possibilities of the kitchen cabinet and the advent of Dralon in spring/summer 2001. But the most exciting conversation was about whether it would be quicker to go via Liverpool Street or Crouch End to get to Dullsville.
This level of disinterest was even - shock horror - extended to me. It wasn't that people were rude or bitchy when I talked to them. It was just that their vacant stares and their stimulating conversations about the shortcomings of the Tube wouldn't falter and I would be ignored. I made the mistake of wishing somebody a happy Valentine's Day only to see them look at me as though I had suggested a bizarre sex act. I was almost tempted to suggest a bizarre sex act, to see what would happen.
Yet these were folk who had made fashion their life's work; surely they of all people should have been excited by what was coming up next season? I was now reminded of all the celebrities who have in the past enthused about coming to Ireland - the craic, the parties, the excitement: at the Brown Thomas International Model show at the Point just the week before London, I was seated behind Chris Evans, Anna Friel, Nathalie Imbruglia et al and earwigged shamelessly while they talked about what a fab time they were having. This had been a bit of a mystery to me - I mean, surely there were shows as glamorous as the one in the Point every night of the week in London or New York or Paris? I understood after London Fashion Week: sure, there were glamorous fashion shows but they just weren't events in the same way things in Ireland are.
There just wasn't that sense of occasion and anticipation, that feeling the whole thing is just a massive excuse for a party, the sneaking suspicion dawn might just find you discussing the merits of rasher sandwiches in the early houses on the quays.
Now this isn't entirely fair because while the shows in London are huge extravaganzas, they are essentially working occasions. Those in the front row are not celebrities on their jollys but professionals hard at work, and this is probably the crux of the thing. From the outside, fashion looks like frivolity and every effort is made to keep it looking that way. A lot of friends were astonished by my lack of enthusiasm about London Fashion Week, having seen television footage during the week which made it look like one long, glamorous cocktail party. During Paris and Milan, newspapers are full of photographs of ever more wacky and colourful outfits, all shocking pink fur and horsehair.
But behind its trivial and clownlike face, fashion is nothing but big business. And like many big businesses, it has at its centre a rather cold and disinterested heart. The hugely underweight girls that model the clothes are that way because clothes tend to hang best on a simple frame of bones rather than being pushed out of shape by anything as unnecessary as flesh. Real fur, which was a pariah for so many years, has made a come-back, and you can be damn sure it's as much because of the huge prices a fur coat can command as because of its fashionably retro connotations. Money, not passion or compassion, fuels fashion.
So was it any wonder the folk at London Fashion Week weren't eccentrics full of humour, vagaries, pomposity and colour? Was it any surprise the most important topic of conversation was transport methods and their shortcomings? These are commuters whose office is the catwalk, whose uniform is fishnets, stilettos and a nifty clutch bag, and who were probably wondering why on earth the office girl was wishing them a happy Valentine's Day.