We Attended London Fashion Week So You Didn't Have To, And Frankly We Wish We Hadn't

There is an unwritten rule in fashion, as old and sacred as the Magna Carta and considerably better enforced: thou shalt not be the first to say the quiet part loud. It is a rule observed with religious devotion in every front row from Somerset House to the Tate Modern, a silent social contract signed in invisible ink on the back of your complimentary show programme. And nowhere — nowhere — is that contract more vigorously upheld than at London Fashion Week, where this correspondent spent four days watching the British fashion establishment collectively agree that they could see the emperor's new clothes just fine, thank you very much, while the emperor stood shivering in a bin bag and one Croc.

I am not speaking metaphorically.

The Look That Launched A Thousand Thinkpieces

It was day three. The collection was from a label I shall call — because I have signed something — 'a celebrated emerging house.' The model emerged from behind a curtain of what appeared to be shredded receipts from Greggs (the programme insisted it was 'archival denim, deconstructed') and she was wearing, on her left foot, a single sage-green Croc. Her right foot was bare. Her torso was wrapped in what any reasonable person — any person who had ever, say, put their recycling out — would identify as a standard-issue black bin bag, cinched at the waist with what the show notes described as a 'reclaimed tension harness.'

It was a cable tie.

The look was titled, in the programme, 'Deconstructed Grief (After Winnicott).' The woman sitting to my left — a senior editor at a magazine whose name you would recognise — wrote in her notebook, without a flicker of hesitation: 'Devastating. The asymmetry speaks.'

I looked at my own notebook. I had written: 'Is that a Biffa bag?'

I crossed it out.

The Language, The Beautiful, Impenetrable Language

To understand London Fashion Week, you must first understand that fashion criticism has developed its own dialect — a patois so thoroughly divorced from English that it functions less as communication and more as a loyalty test. To speak it fluently is to prove you belong. To hesitate is to reveal yourself as an outsider, a civilian, someone who buys their trousers at Marks & Spencer without irony.

This season's critical vocabulary included, but was not limited to: 'post-dialectical softness,' 'the wound as silhouette,' 'negative space as emotional autobiography,' and, my personal favourite, 'a garment that asks whether the body is a guest or a tenant.' That last one referred to a jacket with no back panel. It was, by any conventional measure, half a jacket. It retails for £3,400.

The fashion press received all of this with the serene confidence of people who have absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent understood the assignment. Reviews appeared within hours. 'Harrowing in the best possible way,' wrote one. 'A collection that makes grief wearable,' offered another. 'The Croc is a provocation. The Croc is a question. The Croc is us,' concluded a third, in what I can only assume was a cry for help.

A Front Row United In Magnificent Confusion

I conducted what I shall generously call 'research' during the interval of one particularly challenging show — a collection apparently inspired by 'the bureaucratic sublime,' which in practice meant a great many looks involving staples and Post-it notes — by quietly asking three separate front-row attendees what they made of it all.

The first told me it was 'a meditation on late-stage administrative capitalism.' The second said it was 'viscerally Kafkaesque.' The third leaned in very close and whispered, 'I have absolutely no idea what's happening but my editor will fire me if I say that, so I'm going with viscerally Kafkaesque.'

There it was. The compact, laid bare. The entire ecosystem of London Fashion Week rests on a collective agreement that everyone is following the thread, that the emperor is magnificently dressed, that the bin bag is grief and the cable tie is tension and the one Croc is — God help us — a question about the body as tenant.

And it works. It works brilliantly. Because the moment one person admits they're baffled, the whole thing collapses like a badly constructed fascinator in the rain at Ascot, and then where are we? Back to buying trousers at M&S, that's where. And none of us — none of us — is ready for that.

The Afterparty, Where Honesty Goes To Die

The closing night afterparty was held in a railway arch in Bermondsey that smelled powerfully of damp and ambition. The collection's designer — young, cheekboned, wearing something that appeared to be a boiler suit that had been in an argument with itself — held court near a table of warm Aperol Spritzes while journalists queued to tell him his work had 'genuinely moved' them.

I watched a man from a broadsheet supplement describe the bin bag look as 'the most emotionally intelligent garment he had encountered in a decade of reviewing.' The designer nodded with the solemn gravity of a man receiving the Turner Prize. Nobody laughed. Nobody blinked.

I finished my warm Aperol Spritz. I looked at the designer. I looked at the journalist. I thought about saying something.

Then I wrote in my notebook: 'A collection that interrogates the self. The Croc endures.'

You have to survive in this industry somehow.

Gerald 'Gezza' Fothergill is Vogue Victims' Chief Correspondent for Events He Is No Longer Sure Were Real. His boiler suit is from Primark and he is not sorry.