Vampires in the Sunlight

Catwalking.com

From Left: A catsuit from the show and a model accompanies the designer Pam Hogg at the end of the show

In the mid 80s, when I started to report fashion shows, Pam Hogg was huge. Well, she wasn't, she was absolutely tiny, and she still is, as we saw when she appeared in a catsuit of her own design at the end of her show, but she was fashion-huge. So I insisted to Rebecca Johnson, the young fashion scribe aged 22 I have already mentioned, that we sit together because, for once, I would be able to show off that I knew EVERYBODY. All week, Rebecca has been I'd-ing people about whom I have no clue. (You didn't actually think I recognized the singer from The Gallows, who modeled in the Charles Anastase show, did you?)

It started so well. "You have to let her in! She's Marion Hume!" screamed a voice, and bless me, if it wasn't Stephen Mahoney, who I first met at a party where Spandau Ballet, then THE band, were drinking from plastic cups. Then I bumped into Colin Gold, who used to do the door of the Mudd Club in the days where Doc Martin boots, a Vivienne Westwood mini-crini and a bleached blonde crop were de rigeur for a boy and he pointed out Mark Moore from S Express and we both started humming "I've got the hots for you." Front row was Susie Bick, mother of Jethro Cave who modeled the Malia Obama tribute leather jacket the other day and she was wearing a t-shirt reading "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!", which Rebecca said was the title of Nick Cave's new album but as she hadn't known who Susie Bick was till I told her, I still felt I was in the lead. But then it stopped being fun. There was a vampiric atmosphere, as if, as it was so long ago, we shouldn't have been seeing each other in daylight. Or at night. "I went out to a terrible party last night, everyone was 20!" I heard someone say.

Alas, the show was flat. Rebecca said it was because the timing was wrong-that metallic jumpsuits would have been more in tune with 2006, when there was a renaissance of the underground club scene which ended when Boombox was shuttered on New Year's Eve 2007. But I said it was because now, no one wants to come to a show unless they have a front row seat, so the place was rather empty. "Back in our day"-I actually heard those words come out of my mouth-"we forged tickets, we crawled under the side of the tent, or clambered in toilet windows, or hid out backstage," then I got almost misty eyed when I got to the bit about how eleven of us Brits once got into a Gianni Versace party to which not one of us was invited, which remains the proudest moment of my career. "The problem is there's no fashion liggers anymore," I said, referring to uninvited guests who used to whoop and holler throughout the shows, drunk on champagne they had pinched from backstage. "What's a ligger?" asked Rebecca.