It's amazing what can happen when you've got your head down. One minute everyone is wearing sober suits: all knee-length skirts and pussy-bow blouses, chic but sincere - almost coy. Then I look up and find myself surrounded by, well, what look like slappers.
Tatler says it's OK, desirable even, to dress like this. Indeed, a greater compliment cannot be paid a girl these days than saying: "Babe! You look so porno!" Girls willingly wear teeny-tiny logo T-shirts, proclaiming themselves to be in various stages of readiness. You're no one now unless your tights are purposely ripped by Christian Dior's representative on earth (this will cost you £25). Even couture must look as cheap and tarty as possible. Rivets, laces, fake fur - they all help the cause.
Looking like a slapper, a slag, looking sexy and sleazy and almost downright pornographic is where it's at.
This is a fashion that couldn't have existed any time but now. Up until the late 1980s, most people spent their whole time trying to look as respectable, and rich, as possible. But when we all got respectable-looking, it was impossible to tell who was rich and who wasn't any more, and so it became necessary to turn the whole thing on its head. The Victorians, as shown by the current exhibition at Tate Britain, loved nothing more than a bit of flesh - the difference being that they were smart enough to call it art.
Once, aged 18, I dressed a bit like this. Short skirt, black fishnet stockings over red stockings. I particularly enjoyed going up and down the metal filigree spiral staircase in my parents' cafe, watching the young, Italian, male staff downstairs watching me. As I remember, it was enormous fun. It provoked, it got me attention, and it annoyed the hell out of my father. For some reason, it was wonderful to pretend to be sleazy - but I guess that dressing like a slapper doesn't provide quite the same thrill if you actually are one. Luckily, I grew up and started to love fleece and food too much to dress like that any longer.
I've also lost any interest in looking at others who are dressed like slappers. Not for any puritanical reasons: in a society where you can't change what people think, you try to impose restrictions on the way they dress - and if I wanted that, I'd go and live in Saudi Arabia or Swaziland. But, as a look, it's over. It's mainstream, too contrived and, worst of all, it's gone all middle-class. (How long before some out-of-touch executive at the Daily Mail realises that not all girls who dress like slappers are actually in the porn industry, and decides to run a piece on it? After all, it took them several years to realise that lesbians sometimes wear lipstick.)
We can blame celebrities for the mainstreaming of the porn look. Geri Halliwell gets acres of coverage in direct proportion to how little she wears (and how much weight she has lost). Forget talent, or work, or original vision. I'm picking on Geri, but that name is interchangeable with just about any two-bit celebrity from screen or stage: Pammy, Patsy, Lizzy . . . The point is that all this pseudo-porn nudity, all the bellies, bosoms and bottoms that are on show have become standard fare for celebrities. And conversely, all it takes to be a celebrity these days is to bare some skin - wear a dress that splits, a skirt that rides high, a top that gapes open.
"Celebrities know that showing flesh is the fast-track route to publicity," says Lisa Armstrong, fashion editor of the Times. "You get these nobodies turning up to things in see-through dresses and the next day they're in the papers. And because celebrities are the bridgehead between the catwalk and real people, the more we see it happen, the more we find it acceptable." Celebrities have become more daring about baring more because they have stylists to dress them and advise them.
But the end is in sight. Two weeks ago, Peter Lindbergh announced that the Pirelli calendar for 2002 - featuring George W Bush's niece Lauren on the cover - will feature models who are fully clothed for the first time in the history of Pirelli calendars. "Nudity," announced Lindbergh at the press conference, "is boring."
"And really," adds Armstrong, "unless we're going to get gynaecological, how much more can people expose?"
Even Charlotte Semler, one half of the new label/shop/concept Myla (logo: "Sex. Life. Accessories"), which sells predominantly lingerie-type things with, um, toys as well, thinks the nudity thing is over. "Nudity is deeply boring, it's so obvious, and the whole point of seduction is about what you've not yet seen. Nudity removes the mystique, which is why couples invest in beautiful lingerie."
Armstrong is ever madly hopeful that one day really soon "we'll judge celebrities by their talent", not their ability to wear as little as possible. "Soon only slappers will dress like slappers," she warns. So just remember: saying someone looks like a slag is a compliment - but only for another couple of weeks.
