SETTING up an interview with fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana is a nightmare. Until the last minute, the appointment time is changed and the venue is undecided. Then they offer half an interview – Stefano will talk, Domenico won’t. Then they relent. Next they refuse to have their photographs taken. I arrive in Milan to discover the couple don’t speak English. But, of course, I did forget to ask.

In the event, Stefano turns up and Domenico appears half an hour late. Stefano, 33, is impossibly good looking and charming and Domenico, 36, is all in black. Carla Buzzi, their PR lady with raven hair, black leggings and coal Dolce & Gabbana tent top, translates. This hinders spontaneity. ‘Are you lovers as well as business partners?’ I ask. Solo blah blah amore blah blah. ‘Ha ha ha,’ shrieks Carla. Natter, natter, natter in Italian. ‘Yes,’ comes the cursory reply.

They dress Madonna (‘a friend’), Sting, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Isabella Rossellini (‘a very good friend’), Julia Roberts, Kate Moss (‘not a good friend’ – but they discovered her), Kim Basinger and Brooke Shields. In 1991 Dolce & Gabbana – as they are known in labelspeak – were dubbed Italy’s hottest fashion property. ‘After four years nothing can be hot any more unless you use microwave,’ says Stefano.

Their 1994 worldwide turnover was £66 million, an increase of 81 per cent over the previous year. ‘British sales, buonissima,’ says Stefano. (They love British fashion. What the young do here gets taken up in New York and Milan, they say.) Now, 13 years after starting, they’re manufacturing accessories, perfume and furnishings too. Where do they stand beside Armani, Versace and Valentino? ‘We’re just chickens,’ says Domenico. ‘Like their nephews,’ adds Stefano.

Today they open their first British store, in Sloane Street. Armed with high heels, wielding long patent boots and brandishing studded belts, Stefano and Domenico will fight in the front line of the Bond Street versus Sloane Street battle – a fight highlighted by fashion oracle Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune this week.

Army headquarters is three floors of decorated sandstone, opaquely stuccoed terra rossa and pastel ochre walls, and launch party soldiers from George Michael, Naomi Campbell and the Le Bons to Amanda de Cadenet. IT COMES as no surprise that the maverick duo has chosen to open in Sloane Street, just a few red patent heeled steps from Prada, natch. ‘Bond Street is too status for us,’ explains Domenico. It’s what this month’s Vogue dubs the New Snobbery. Old Snobs cling to their vulgar chain link handbags; New Snobs, identified only by the cognoscenti, swing plastic Prada ones discreetly. The point is that New Snobs spurn obvious displays of status. We meet in their private clients’ showroom, the day after Gucci scion Maurizio was shot on the streets of Milan. ‘Mamma mia,’ says Stefano. ‘All the fashion world is really shocked. We didn’t know him personally. He was not a social person, he was very intimate.’

On the wall is an imposing antique gilt frame containing a bra. The bra, Stefano has said, is like a jewellery box, protecting the most precious part of a woman. ‘We love the most feminine attributes of the women, like their breasts. The symbol of maternity and eroticism. Maybe because in our dreams we would like to be like them,’ he says now.

Dolce & Gabbana have changed the look of (biscuit-suited) Italian fashion with their ironic clothes, which draw inspiration from bordellos and pornography. Domenico says they’re not preoccupied with sex. ‘It’s an important part of life and has to be evaluated seriously.’

Stefano denies they peddle chic pornography. ‘I never show anything. You will never see a woman without a bra or slip. I want to show but not see.’ Their autumn collection has women in men’s tailoring and men who have plundered the wardrobes of Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. (‘In this moment being trendy is not trendy. We have gone outside fashion’ – Stefano, Milan, 1995.) But their trademark is underwear as outerwear.

For autumn they’ve also shown bustiers and corsets underneath erotic little black see-through dresses worn by riding-crop wielding models in long black boots. ‘We’re talking about rich women who have very little to do and have an attitude that is a bit sodomising,’ explains Carla, for Stefano. Sodomising? ‘No, sadistic, but in a very chic way.’

This brings us to Madonna. She rejected Jean-Paul Gaultier, designer of the famous conical bra, in favour of Dolce & Gabbana to design the costumes for her Girlie tour. Shortly after they were reported as saying they had not seen her show and had not been paid.

‘The Washington Post said we were angry Madonna didn’t pay her invoices,’ says Stefano. ‘But the clothes were a present we gave her. We never asked for money.’

What about the material girl? What stories do they have to tell? Dramatic pause. ‘She likes cinnamon sticks and liquorice,’ replies Stefano. It’s hard to tell if he’s being ironic.

And what of Brooke Shields? Isabella Rossellini? Kate Moss? ‘The funniest thing is that these women all fit into the same dress,’ confides Domenico. ‘It’s a miracle.’

JO CORRE spent much of his childhood in a dustbin. Jo, 27, is the son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the punk poseur who managed the Sex Pistols. The first time Jo jumped into a dustbin was with his brother Ben, to retrieve the toys Malcolm had thrown away because he wouldn’t tidy his room. ‘Once we’d discovered this place where you found loads of other stuff as well, we were, like, always in the dustbins,’ says Jo. ‘Most parents wouldn’t let their children play with us because we were really dirty.’

Jo’s parents never married (‘If anyone thinks they’re worse off because their parents aren’t married, they’re mad’) and Ben was sent to live with his father, Derek Westwood. Jo went to nine schools until he left home, aged 16. ‘I was sent to boarding schools from the age of five because my parents didn’t have any money. They’d put me in schools like Dean Grange or Bellon House for a couple of terms then come in the middle of the night and take me away so that they never paid the fees.’

Malcolm refused ever to let Jo call him ‘Dad’. (Malcolm hardly saw his own mother until he was a grown man, shared his grandmother’s bed until he was 10 and was raised without a sense of family.) ‘I remember calling him Dad once when I was five and he told me my father was the milkman. So I started calling the milkman Dad, until I realised that was wrong too.’ Malcolm also insisted Jo have the surname Corre, Malcolm’s mother’s maiden name.

We’re sitting on a roll of carpet above Agent Provocateur, the Soho lingerie shop Jo and his girfriend and business partner Serena Rees opened last week. They sell Vivienne’s prostitutes’ shoes with 12-inch heels, balcony corset tops with granny knickers and bunny cages and a £900 brass chastity belt. Serena offers us Nipple of Venus chocolates then goes off to ‘nail varnish Diane’s nipples because they don’t show enough.’ Diane is a shapely mannequin in the window in football net stockings.

Jo wears an olive cord suit, banker’s shirt, wannabe beard, long sideburns and a face of Vivienne intensity. He has a missing tooth (‘it fell out when it got rotten’), dirty nails and an ear pierced seven times. He speaks to the wall in a grating voice, and drops his aitches. But he has a genial disposition although he claims to have a ferocious temper. We return to the subject of his childhood. His parents believed in allowing him his independence. When he was eight and Ben just 12, they set off alone on their bikes to see their grandparents. The brothers lived in London. Their grandparents lived in Devon. And the journey took a week. ‘We stayed in youth hostels and tents. We had these really shit kids’ bikes with one gear, piled high with all this heavy stuff.’ Didn’t their mother think it dangerous? ‘No, it was an adventure. I mean like Mum always said if anyone tries to mess around with you, scream and make a fuss and don’t go quietly.

‘Anyway, we were looking for somewhere to pitch our tent in the middle of the night and the police went past. They saw these two young boys with all this stuff and thought we were runaways. They called our grandparents, then let us put our tent in the back of the police station.”

Two years later, he went to the South of France with a 10-year-old friend. ‘After four days, we were only quarter of the way to Paris. We couldn’t make it, so turned around and went to Boulogne and made a hut out of driftwood on Boulogne beach and stayed there for three-and-a-half weeks.’

HE STARTED working, aged 16, as a market trader, moved into dispatch riding then worked with his mother for nine years. Nowadays Jo lives in a rented Pimlico house with Serena and four others and spends his free time getting ‘completely smashed. But not drugs. I did a bit of pot from when I was about 12 and bits and bobs here and there when I used to go out seven nights a week.’

Jo is fiercely protective of his mother. Vivienne, who wears six-inch platform heels and peroxide pin curls while chainsmoking Gitanes, is the sort of parent who would mortify most offspring. ‘I was never embarrassed by her.’ He’s enthusiastic about her having a toyboy second husband, 25 years her junior. ‘It’s brilliant. Until recently Vivienne’s mother had one 40 years her junior.’

And sympathetic towards Vivienne turning up, aged 50, at Kensington Palace in a see-through dress. ‘She didn’t intend to. She wore a dress that she thought was beautiful and when you put camera flash on it, it went transparent. The same thing happened when they caught her at Buckingham Palace with no knickers on.’

But Jo scarcely sees Malcolm. He once paid for Jo to go on a school skiing trip, but insisted he read a book on the Sex Pistols first. ‘The day before I was due to go skiing, he wouldn’t let me go because I hadn’t read the bloody boring book.’

In the late Sixties, Malcolm and three friends dressed up as Father Christmas and went to Selfridges toy department where the store’s Father Christmas was already working. ‘They went through the department giving toys to all the kids. The staff were tearing around trying to find out which was the real Father Christmas. When the assistants tried to take back the toys, the mothers yelled, ‘How dare you, Father Christmas gave it to him’.’ His parents like to shock the stuffy English.

THIS week the stickers and banners have gone up all over London. Sales season is upon us. But, before you brave the glossy shops of Knightsbridge and Bond Street and pick up that discounted silk shirt or cut-price designer frock you couldn’t previously have afforded without a second mortgage, beware.

My own sorry saga began when I bought two suits and a cotton polo in the last Guy Laroche sale. At £760, including £40 for initial alterations, this was a high price for a couple of outfits. But many of us happily fork out under the pressure tactics of designer boutique sales assistants for slashed-price, end-of-season clothes with pre-sale price tags suggesting the garments are sewn with 18 carat gold. My mistake was not to pay so much, but to pay so much for clothes that I could not immediately walk away wearing. One suit needed just the buttons to be moved. A job executed perfectly. However, the £312 brown suit, a Herms-style riding jacket and skirt, needed more work. On 11 January Michelle Cuiec, the manageress, agreed that with a little nip and tuck for £20, the skirt would be more to my taste. Their delightful tailor pinned it.

When I returned to Bond Street to collect it, the skirt had been shortened, but not tapered as I’d asked. So they did it again. When I went back at the end of February, it still wasn’t done as I wanted. They did it yet again. Sometimes they made me pay for the alterations, sometimes they were free.

Once the skirt was changed, the jacket appeared proportionally too big. Being neither a professional seamstress nor fashion vendeuse, I’d have been grateful for prior notice of this simple aesthetic snare. Now the jacket badly required alteration. I made yet another trek to Bond Street on 12 March, complaining only a little.

Eventually, the skirt fitted beautifully. But as soon as I sat down it creased hideously. It looked disgusting. I was told this was a problem with the material and, astonishingly, that I shouldn’t sit when I was wearing it. As for the jacket … It was altered. And collected. And returned. ‘I can’t believe this,’ I wailed in a letter to the manageress. ‘It has been altered and made far tighter than ever we agreed. It is now difficult even to move my arms.’ Michelle was indignant. She implied that the fault was mine and suggested I see her to sort out the problem.

As I stood in my strait-jacket, Michelle told me the fit was perfect. My movement was still restricted. I insisted it be altered again. When finished, it pinched under the arms, pulled across the back and was uncomfortable to wear unless unbuttoned. For the price, plus the alterations, I wanted a suit I could wear. Or a refund. ‘Since you were quite happy with the jacket in January,’ Michelle wrote in May, ‘I suggest we put it back as it was originally.’ Unbelievable! I was furious. Now, perhaps I made a mistake in requesting the work done. However, if sales staff are only too keen to suggest that with slight alteration a garment will be perfect, should they not also point out when alterations are unwise?

I am not the only one to have a sad story from the sales. Sandra Yarwood is an economics graduate and producer of Beg, a film snapped up for the Edinburgh film festival and showing soon in a cinema near you. But when she chose a Cerruti sale mix ‘n’ match jacket and long skirt reduced to £438, she lost her financial sense. Like many before her, her judgment left with the thought of a sale bargain.

‘The jacket fitted but the skirt was a size too small,’ says Sandra. ‘It was too tight, particularly around the hips.’ They didn’t have her size, but the assistant said it could be let out and the tailor agreed. So she paid for the suit, and £20 for alterations.

ON THE day it was meant to be ready, it wasn’t. ‘I was furious, but they delivered it free of charge a few days later.’ She tried it on. ‘It looked revolting. It was badly puckered at the seams. Typical woman, I blamed myself and thought, ‘I shouldn’t have bought it’.’

Cerruti had said it didn’t take responsibility for alterations. She decided to forget the matter. Then she thought: ‘It’s from Cerruti, not Boutique El Cheapo. I’ve never spent so much on a suit.’ Back to Bond Street. There the assistant agreed the skirt was ‘all wrong’ and returned it to the tailor. A few days later, Sandra collected it eagerly. All the tailor had done was iron it.

Cerruti sent it to another tailor. A month after she’d paid for it, Sandra collected it again. ‘They’d let it out at the hips. But it’s so narrow at the bottom that I could hardly walk in it,’ she says glumly. ‘It’s just not my size.’

The first time she wore it, it ripped badly. ‘Now I can just about move in it but it’s still highly uncomfortable.’ Surely the vendor should have pointed out these pitfalls before doing the work?

‘I felt it was my decision, and that it was an expensive lesson,’ she replies, ruefully. ‘But I won’t ever again buy anything that needs altering.’

THE secret of human sexual attraction has been solved and scientists have found a way to bottle sex appeal. Professor George Dodd of Warwick University has developed The Pheromone Factor, a synthetic version of the chemicals (pheromones) secreted by the body to attract others. Your pheromone-enhanced smell, he claims, will hook a sexual partner by acting on his subconscious.

The Pheromone Factor (TPF) comes in a nasty 15ml plastic bottle and at £29.99 plus £3 P&P costs roughly the same as a bottle of Bollinger Grande Annee. Since TPF smells like hair spray, Bollinger seems the more likely aphrodisiac.

‘The formulation will not automatically put people under your spell,’ says the blurb on the bottle of sexual success. ‘But it will kindle any sparks of attraction that may be present. It is urged that you use it responsibly.’ The instructions tell me to add 10 drops of TPF to 30ml of my own favourite fragrance. Chanel 19 only comes in 50ml bottles, so I have to add 16.6 drops. I plough on with enthusiasm because I know from women’s magazines that I need sex to stay trim and keep my wrinkles at bay. Then I go to Harrods to enhance my own sexuality, stimulate sexual responses and improve my chances of finding a partner. After all, this is the hot spot where Richard Gere was kissed by Miss UK Amanda Johnson before he ventured into the bed department where a brass bed almost collapsed under the weight of females trying to get near the greying heart throb. I’m wearing office purdah – my body covered from high necked jumper to ankles – so it won’t be my tantalising clothes that pull the men. But they will sniff and be uncontrollably drawn to me. No male shopper will be safe. Before the eyes of the startled throng, I’ll be passionately entwined. I hose myself with Chanel 19 and TPF in the Harrods perfumerie then stand and wait. It’s mostly women in there and there’s more than a smell of hormones in this sales rush. Modern standards of hygiene mean that normally I disguise my natural body odours and sexual pheromones. But now I’ve replaced mine, I can sense the hordes of ravenous males herding in my direction.

I stand and I wait. And still I stand and wait. Researchers think an organ in the nose specialises in sexual smells. When you lose your sense of smell, your libido nosedives. I presume the men in the perfumerie have lost their sense of smell.

I go to the food halls. The scents in TPF each have an almost exact molecular counterpart in classic aphrodisiac foods. Dodd’s ingredients include oysters to caviar, ripe stilton and champagne – but they are all subliminal, so I don’t smell like a larder. En route a man starts to flash at me. But it’s only a Harrods model policeman with his flashing light. I WAFT expectantly by a row of men in the delicatessen who remain with their backs firmly planted to my face. A man at the fish bar tells me I smell too floral – but only after some prompting and my burying his nose in my brain. I’d have more success if I buried my head in a bowl of oysters. I go upstairs where in desperation I sit on a brass bed. I move a male customer’s bag in order to sit. ‘Do you want to buy it?’ he asks, snappily. ‘I work for the Evening Standard and I’m wearing sex pheromones,’ I tell him. ‘I smell nothing,’ he replies, walking off.

I call the chairman Mohammed Al Fayed to ask if he’d like to smell me. I’m assured he’d have been charmed but he’s out.

Back in the street the Harrods head doorman treats me courteously. He’s been there for donkey’s years and never sniffed a customer before. But even a green man isn’t turned on.

Suddenly two stallions loom into view. Pauke and Vechter, the 16-hand Harrods horses. Pauke, six years old, is a toyboy and shows great interest in me.

But it turns out to be the smell of mints that he’s pursuing. TRACEY in Barkers’ perfume department already knew all about pheromones. ‘My mum sold a bottle in her boutique in Reading to the man from the martial arts shop next door,’ she confided. So did it work? ‘I don’t think he got any girls,’ she said, ‘but his dog jumped on him.’ He should have read the small print – it warns that The Pheromone Factor is ‘not tested on animals’.

I was hoping for better luck as I mixed the required number of drops of my neutral-smelling colourless pheromone liquid with Obsession For Men eau de toilette – Tracey’s personal recommendation as the sexiest male scent – and splashed it on. Tracey somehow managed to restrain herself and I strode out into the streets of Kensington, confident that women’s heads would turn wherever I went and mindful of the warning on the bottle to ‘act responsibly’.

No one on the street seemed to notice that they were walking past a sex god. I hailed a cab and headed for an appointment at a Mayfair hotel. My taxi driver, who was a man, managed to keep his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel despite the overpowering whiff in the back of his cab. At the hotel my interviewee, the country singer John Denver, also managed to control himself, although there were occasions when he leaned towards me to emphasise certain points. We didn’t exchange numbers.

It was only as I was bidding farewell to the glamorous publicist that I got the first glimmer that the pheromones might be taking effect. She suddenly started talking about sex videos, apropos of nothing in particular, and I revealed my secret. Suddenly she looked very flustered: her cheeks went bright red, she clasped her hands to her face and stifled some laughter. For a moment it seemed as if it might be the start of a beautiful relationship. Then she explained the joke: ‘I wondered what it was – I was feeling a little sick.’

The next appointment was lunch with a couple of PR girls at a trendy restaurant. As I waited on my own for them to arrive an attractive waitress bumped into me and apologised with a charming smile: could it have been intentional? I may never know.

WHEN the girls arrived they gave no outward signs of wanting to consummate lunch. Any fantasies of what some newspapers might call a ‘three-in-a-bed romp’ were fading fast as I agonised over when to spill the beans about my sexy secret. I waited until the end of the main course to reveal all. The girls were apologetic for not having exhibited more passion but confessed that they were unmoved. They hadn’t even noticed the smell.

Janet Reger, the Queen of Knickers cum Maureen Lipman of the underwear world, is commenting on the storm in a B-cup caused by the Kate Moss underwear pictures in this month’s Vogue. Entitled Under-exposure, the grunge model looks like a 13-year-old. Are the pictures disgusting? Hideous? Tragic? Paedophile?

Kate Moss happened to be wearing a Janet Reger pink lace bra (£100) in the pictures, but it is not a look that Queen Janet usually encourages. ‘We don’t subscribe to that look or find it attractive. I like women to look like women and girls to look like girls.’ Her daughter Aliza, Princess of Knickers, nods approvingly.

Janet Reger has been making slinky bras – and briefs, basques, nightdresses and nightgowns – for the past 26 years, and there is nothing she does not know about what men want.

So what sort of underwear should you wear to get your man? ‘Clean,’ replies Princess Aliza perfunctorily.

‘By the time he gets to your underwear, it’s a question of holding your man, not getting your man,’ interjects the Queen. ‘Men appreciate women who look good. If a woman looks like a slut, men won’t fancy her however kind and loving she is. All men are into black lace and black silk satin.’ Raine Spencer, she of the legendary libido, is a customer and mainly buys silk nightwear. La Contessa is, apparently, not ideally proportioned for mass production. How did she catch her Count? ‘She’s charming and we make her lots of silk nightwear and underwear specially. Sometimes she wants it cut a little higher or slit a little lower. She’s quite tall, of small build and hippy.’ La Contessa netted her Count with couture lingerie, natch. Lord Bath, the Loins of Longleat, visits regularly to kit out his 54 wifelets. ‘He spends lots and lots, and buys outrageous amounts,’ says the Princess, contentedly. ‘Since Christmas, he’s been in three times. He usually buys silk and is well in for a few hundred pounds each time.’ Four sisters from a Saudi royal family spent £53,000 on nightwear and promptly sent it all to the dry cleaners. Fergie always bags a big bag of lingerie. And then there’s Princess Michael of Kent and Princess Diana . . .

Eric Clapton ran up a ‘horrifying’ bill over Christmas. Rod Stewart shops with Rachel. ‘She does a help yourself and goes through all the drawers like a self-service,’ says the Princess. And singing star cum Bosnian relief worker Cher spends £1,000 on each of her visits.

Her business was born in the Sixties in a flurry of silk and lace, spawned a million high street copies and went into voluntary liquidation in 1983. She bounced back and now operates from her Beauchamp Place shop and sells by mail order.

Janet Reger sells a black bra trimmed with marabou feathers (with which you can fish) and glitter for £111; snakeskin Lycra stretch bra and briefs for £122; a beautiful housecoat with hand-appliqued French lace for £499; eau-de-nil chiffon frilly bra, brief and suspenders; a Chinese bustier with brocade and toggles.

‘Men don’t buy that sort of thing,’ she says, twanging a Chinese toggle, ‘because they don’t feel safe with it.’ Currently the most fashionable garment is a Lycra peasant-style body in chenille finish with front lacing. Silk satin bras, briefs and suspender belts with lace are perennially the most popular items with men. They simply don’t buy bodies. And women opt for a greater variety of lingerie, from bodies to camisoles. A standard array of transvestites buy camiknickers and lots of nightwear. ‘One comes in here and spends £800 on his sister,’ intones Queen Janet. So whither Nineties underwear? ‘It’s going stretchy and corsetted,’ she says.

All is not quiet on the lingerie front. There have been strange stirrings amid the famous boned and underpinned negligees, lace G-strings and frothy pink bras. Recently they had a woman in the shop who broke off her engagement because her fiance bought her some Reger underwear. She stormed Beauchamp Place with her ivory silk bra. ‘I presume she was militantly women’s lib,’ says the Queen, drawing dedicatedly on her Silk Cut. ‘She came marching into the shop and screamed, ‘Take this back. I don’t know what he was thinking of. I’ve never been so insulted in my life. What sort of woman do you think I am?’ ‘ Another storm in a B-cup?

Victor Edelstein, one of Princess Diana’s favourite designers, is having a mid-life crisis. He’s 46 years old, has worked in fashion for 32 years and has clients from the Duchess of Kent to Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. Now he’s closing his couture house and starting his second life. ‘I’m going to be very poor for a long time,’ he says. ‘But I don’t mind. I want to be free.’ In 1967, aged 21, Victor was assistant to Barbara Hulanicki at Biba. Next he was assistant designer at Christian Dior. Then in 1977 he started on his own, but went bankrupt. Instead of slinking away and becoming a pattern cutter, he salvaged something out of his liquidation and moved into couture.

At its height in 1989, the turnover was £1 million a year. (His dresses – flattering, elegant and heavenly – start at £2,500.) Now he refuses even to look at his accounts. Couture, he says, is no longer fashionable and he doesn’t have the resources to wait for a revival. ‘I don’t want to get deeper and deeper into debt.’ He intends to spend his time painting watercolours, writing travel articles, illustrating a Cinderella book and designing for the stage.

Victor has an unconventional marriage and lives alone in a one-bedroom flat. He stopped living with Annamaria, his Catholic wife and dealer in old master drawings, 12 years ago after eight years of marriage. They never divorced, remain good friends, still go on holiday, spend four nights a week together when she is in London, and divide their time between four properties in Paris, Spain and London.

‘Now we’re together for more than half the year. A lot of people envy our marriage,’ he says. ‘We both have flats in London. Sometimes we entertain or spend the weekend in the other’s flat. It works marvellously.’ He doesn’t always include Annamaria when he’s entertaining, and isn’t offended if she doesn’t involve him. ‘I don’t feel insecure. She’s like a second self.’ He first met Annamaria at a friend’s party. ‘I saw her and in some weird way just knew that we were going to get married.’ She had a boyfriend at the time, but they met again six months later when she didn’t – and married in 1973.

Why did they break up? ‘She had this job buying works of art and was away half the time. We were apart too much and the whole thing went sour.’ They split but never stopped seeing one another. ‘We’re together now more than ever.’

Are they sexually loyal? ‘It’s not discussed. We do what we like. There are no rules. Whatever happens happens. But what we like is to be together. Whoever we meet, there is a kind of inevitability that we’re going to remain together.’ He says he doesn’t feel sexual jealousy or possessiveness. ‘The way you keep the love of your life is by making that person feel absolutely free.’

They don’t have children. ‘It wasn’t a decision not to. But nothing happened and she felt there was no point investigating and going through hell trying to have them. She felt if it was meant to be we would have them. I’m sorry we didn’t. But it’s too late now.’

Victor is wearing a Ralph Lauren paisley tie and Prince of Wales suit, and has the looks of a Sir Ralph Halpern crossed with a sartorially equipped daddy-longlegs – he’s 6ft 4in with long face, long hands and long legs. He speaks in a mannered way and is charming and courteous. He’s Mr Nice Guy: ‘I’ve never lost my temper in my whole life. I wish I were more confrontational.’

He is a ‘lapsed’ Jew of Russian Polish extraction. (‘I do have a faith. I believe in God.’) His father and grandfather were dressmakers, and his family was close. As a child, he read a lot and played with a toy theatre. ‘School was hell until the last couple of years because one was artistic, sensitive and taller than everybody else.’ He was already more than six foot at the age of 12.

‘I was quite weedy and used to get knocked about. Thank God I didn’t go to boarding school. I’d have been one of the children who hung themselves in the first week.’ He went to the local grammar school and gained six O-levels.

His father died when he was 19. ‘It was horrible. He was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer.’ His mother then worked as a secretary. ‘Six years of father being ill depleted what money there was.’ Victor was fired from his first job, and then sacked from the following six. ‘I was too dreamy. You imagine yourself throwing lengths of silk over beautiful models and then find yourself chained to a pattern-cutting table.’

He works very hard but is moderate elsewhere in his life. At the age of 21 he got drunk at a Biba party – and has never done so again. Nor has he ever touched a cigarette. And drugs? ‘Well, one’s had the odd joint. But one’s getting old.’

He’s excited to be entering a new era where he’ll be rid of hemlines and deadlines. ‘Lots of people are stuck in jobs and think, ‘God, if only I could do something else’. Well, I can.’ The official reason for the closure is his financial problems. But that is only part of the story. ‘Balenciaga said before he died that a couturier’s life is a dog’s life. It is in many ways. I’ve spent 11 years being polite and constantly watching what I say. I hold an awful lot back. I look at something that’s tight and instead of saying, ‘We’ll let that out’, I have to say, ‘We’ll ease that over the hips’.’ Doesn’t he feel like crawling up the wall? ‘Why do you think I’m stopping?

‘I’m certainly not retiring. I can’t imagine myself staring at the walls or the television from now until the Big Day.’ He thinks of himself as lazy. ‘Like most lazy people I work twice as hard to fight it off. I’ve always had this suspicion that left to my own devices I’d do nothing. Now we’ll see.’ What is he going to live on? ‘That’s my business. Not a lot.’ He’s not materialistic or avaricious. ‘Most of the time I’ve had so little that I count myself as very happy when I know I can pay my bills.’

We return to the subject of his sexuality. Are his inclinations exclusively towards women? He pauses. ‘How are yours?’ he says curtly, before replying in the affirmative. In an industry where many designers are homosexual, he admits he has a feminine side. ‘Maybe she is just getting out in those dresses,’ he says, hamming it up. ‘But I’ve certainly never felt tempted to put them on!’

Eight o’clock on Sunday morning at the Duke of York’s headquarters in Chelsea. We are backstage at the Roland Klein fashion show, part of London Fashion Week. The lights are bright and the seats are empty. The models complain that it is freezing.

By the time the show starts at 12.30 there will be 32 of them. Right now, 10 sultry and tired-looking ones are on the catwalk being accessorised and sartorially refitted. Others wait backstage, gossiping and smoking. Many appear to have got the job by dint of having anorexia and you wouldn’t look twice at some of them without make-up on.

This lasts 25 minutes and costs around £75,000, which doesn’t include making the clothes. None of the models has rehearsed for the show and some of them arrive only 10 minutes before it begins.

Melissa, in Klein’s fake fur, fur boots and a velvet jacket, draws earnestly on a cigarette, then stubs it on the carpet. ‘Dah-ling,’ says Kevin, the producer, kissing the air around model Anjani’s cheeks. Round him the girls keep doing silly walks and pelvic thrusts, in a parody of the job. ‘Can you see my knickers?’ another girl asks him. Model Dunya laughs and says the girls’ ages vary. ‘But we all lie about them.’

It’s 9.30am and Yasmin Le Bon is gossiping. ‘It’s like I had to walk down the runway with one foot, basically.’ Yasmin (who gave birth five months ago to Saffron) looks sensational even in rollers.

Backstage seems like a communal changing-room on the first day of Harrods’ sale, except for the constant thumping music coming from the stage area. A makeshift Neville Daniel hair salon has been set up in the corner, like some pre-fab theatre. By 11am the dressers (women who look like Debenhams sales assistants and help the models change) are sitting doing their knitting. Some processed chicken sandwiches have arrived which, amazingly, the models wolf down. In addition, lots of them put sugar in their coffee.

Everywhere, girls are now doing their faces, one in a yoga position on the floor in the semi-darkness. ‘We do it better, we know our faces better,’ intones Sonia. ‘It’s like,’ says Yasmin, who is doing her own make-up, ‘do they have 30 sets of clean brushes? You don’t want an eye infection.’ At 11.15am four of the models are still missing, rushing in from other shows. The ones who are here are standing around looking bored, in curlers and smoking incessantly. The atmosphere is relaxed. Instead of bitchiness, one hears pleasantries. The only nasty remark came when one model asked where the lavatory was. ‘She’s pretending she’s never been to the toilet,’ sneered her colleague once she’d sashayed off to the Portaloo. There are now about 80 people backstage, in roughly 10 by four metres. The talk is multinational. ‘He paid me 5,000 Deutschmarks for two hours’ work,’ one model is trembling with excitement as she tells her friend. ‘Non lo so,’ comes the reply. There are cries of ‘Did you see your picture in the paper? It’s good’, and ‘Did you do Paul Costello? He’s nice, eh?’. By 12.15pm, the photographers are encamped around the catwalk. The panic about who sits where is over. Roland says: ‘You only have to sit one person wrong and you’ve ‘ad it.’ He hasn’t made his models rehearse, because he wants them to be spontaneous. ‘Just walk,’ he says. ‘Just look natural.’ But he is in a tizz, because the curtain at the back of the walk has been put on the wrong way round.

At 12.20pm, the last model arrives, with windswept hair and no make-up. A squeak goes up in the salon. And now she’s got to wear a bustier and it doesn’t fit. The noise level is increasing, the atmosphere becoming more manic and the excitement is palpable.

‘Into outfits, please,’ the cry goes up at 12.30pm and the hired dalmatian who has to walk up the er, catwalk, starts barking. ‘What pretty lingerie, dah-ling,’ says one model to another. ‘Do you think I’m too small to wear this bra?’ the recipient of the compliment asks the producer. ‘Have a baby, they get bigger,’ he says. ‘Then they go,’ says Yasmin, dolefully. It’s 12.40pm. The music is thumping and the sound of the audience can be heard. The hairdresser is throwing a wobbly because there’s no spray. ‘Come on, we’re starting,’ says Kevin, squeakily. ‘Melissa, Elizabeth, now.’ ‘Take your cigarettes away. Cigarettes off,’ yelps Roland. Suddenly even the plainest ones look stupendous.

At 12.50pm, a force 10 panic is blowing. ‘Who starts off?’ says one girl. ‘Where are the steps?’ asks another. ‘Quick, Melissa, you’re on,’ says Roland. ‘I can’t go on like this,’ she says.

Nearby, Moschino’s male models, who have taken little notice of the girls getting changed in front of them, are themselves now in various degrees of undress and watching the Roland Klein show on the monitor. ‘That doesn’t work at all,’ says one. ‘The dog’s dying to get off.’

The girls run across the room and change clothes at the speed of video fast forward. The hairdresser drags his hands through their hair just before they go on stage. There is a crowd of models waiting to hit the catwalk. ‘Where are they going?’ Roland is crying. ‘Go down the stairs. Behind the scenes is turmoil. But up front things look sleek as clothes make their way sexily up the catwalk. ‘You ‘aven’t been,’ Roland keeps accusing. (Answer: ‘Yes I have.’) ‘You’re all on,’ screams Roland for the finale.

Backstage there are big smiles, claps and euphoria. The show is over. All the models kiss Roland. The dressers take the clothes back. One girl puts on her thermal vest and a pair of skimpy shorts. The others return to the models’ uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. They kiss the air and call au revoir and ciao, and walk out into the rain with their make-up still on their faces.

Cameras flash and the fashion world applauds while eating cheese straws and drinking Lanson champagne. These are the British Fashion Awards – the Oscars of the designer rag trade.

It is all taking place in the tented world of the Duke of York’s barracks. The audience wears black and glitter and off-the-shoulder creations and looks as if it could swap places with the catwalk folk. And then there are the proper models, the 34-22-34 ones who say they won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 and earn up to £1,000 a minute, eclipsing their designer bosses. Naomi Campbell, Helena Christiansen, Tatjana Patiz and Linda Evangelista to be precise. This evening they appear swan-like, sometimes carrying poodles. Without them, any show would lack lustre.

At 10.30 the master of ceremonies announces: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please stand.’ Is this for Naomi, the woman they say expects to be treated like royalty? No . . . it’s Princess Michael of Kent, wearing a glamorous nun’s habit of non-English design.

Vivienne Westwood has won the British Designer of the Year title for the second year running. ‘I want to say thank you to these models, who are worth every penny,’ she says.

The women with pouting lips are seated. Their fees have quadrupled in as many years and they expect to be flown first-class while sales of clothes are falling in these recession-hit times.

Is it true models don’t speak, have no way of projecting their personalities and push lettuce leaves around their plates? And will Helena Christiansen demand a smorgasbord?

A cassoulet of wild mushrooms and asparagus appears. Linda Evangelista, with pimento hair, lights up a Marlboro. And the divine Vivienne Westwood, in a dress printed with Fragonard cherubs, tells me the girls are super. ‘Naomi is charming,’ she says. ‘They’re all professionals, always on time, not prima donnas. They’ve got a marvellous theatrical sense. It costs £5,000 to advertise in a glossy magazine, but with a show you get all this free publicity. When I saw Linda wearing my pink, my heart was beating. To see your clothes on this dream, this dishiest of dishes . . . but if I saw any of them in jeans, I wouldn’t think them that great.’

Princess Michael holds court, later on little clusters of beau monde gather around her. Many of the models weren’t keen on meeting the Royal. ‘Just not interested. They wanted to go back to their hotel,’ said one of their entourage.

Boy George whirls around. His comment? ‘Beauty fades, but talent lives on.’

I meet a supermodel in a Rifat dress. Naomi Campbell, serene and incandescently beautiful, is enjoying a successful evening and a cigarette. Nearby Linda Evangelista looks bored. She smokes cigarettes. When you look like that, you don’t have to do anything. She thaws. ‘I came as a favour for British Vogue and to support British designers. My services were free,’ she tells me. ‘”And what is she wearing? She gives the frostiest of frosty looks. ‘Armani’.

It’s 12.30. People are starting to leave. — And, suddenly, the supermodels have gone. Do they need beauty sleep?

Maverick and inspirational fashion designer who is a byword for the avant-garde and once jumped on a policeman’s back during a punch-up. Fervent and shy woman who is not afraid to shock and put punk, bondage and conical external bras on the catwalk. Humorous and scholarly lass who wore a fig leaf on her body suit on television and wants people to appreciate the intellectual curiosity behind her designs.

Enter, often on platform shoes, the weird and wonderful Vivienne Westwood; the erstwhile Punk Prophetess and Queen of Street Cred who is fed up with being dubbed a rebel.

‘I’m a bit tough looking today because I’m on my bike,’ she says in her soft northern accent. (Her intonation used to embarrass her, but now she’s more interested in what she says than how she says it.) For best, she currently wears her eponymous black velvet dress with Boulle – 18th century French furniture designer – print on it.

Right now she’s wearing polka-dot jeans – ‘how could I say I invented the polka dot? But I never saw a giant one until I started doing them’ – Azedine Alaia cap, rock-climbing boots, masculine ribbed camera and a leather thong around her waist, ‘which looks a bit like a whip’. She looks a mess. She’s wearing none of these in the picture because she didn’t want to be photographed. ‘It’s such a bore – I’d have to do my make-up and hair, which takes about one-and-a-half hours.’

The first impression is of a dizzy, gentle woman who is warm and friendly. She has an ageless face, marvellous cheek bones, pencilled eyebrows and pins in her hair. At the age of 35 she changed her blonde and spiky punk hairstyle and went reddish brown; now she has just gone blonde again. ‘So half of it is the colour of cabbage leaves with this other colour over it.’ Her eyes light with humour and she fiddles with her hairpin. ‘I like myself physically. I probably see all kinds of things in my face that other people don’t see – I think it’s very nice with all kinds of secrets and depth to it.’ She later says: ‘I know I’ve got these horrible saggy things around my chin – but I wouldn’t dream of having a face-lift or anything because I know I wouldn’t look like me.’

She rests her head on her hand, fingers across her brow. ‘I’ve amazing confidence in my looks – I think any man is either mad or stupid who wouldn’t prefer me to every other woman in the room, wherever I go!’ And how does she feel about her body? ‘That’s fine as well. I’ve always taken pleasure in it.’

She’s 50 years old, with a disco soul. ‘I don’t care about my age. If I were advertising in a lonely hearts column I’d say, ‘I have all the intellectual and sexual advantages of being a 50-year-old’.’ She’s a gorgeous woman: slightly dotty, warm, soft and unconventional with an extraordinary imagination. She sits relaxed, with open body language, and talks non stop – darting around in conversation seamlessly while she puffs on a Gauloise.

I ask if she could be a little briefer in her answers. ‘As Aldous Huxley said, ‘Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can be the very body of untruth’.’ She laughs. ‘I prefer to tell the truth about everything,’ she says later. She thinks she’s very direct and honest.

How would she describe herself? ‘More than anything, I’m prepared to work for the future. I know it’s stupid to talk about horoscopes, but I’m a snake in the Chinese ones and I identify with that very long-term plotting sort of person.’

She says she wouldn’t want people to think she had an interest in matters mystical or religious. ‘The greatest function humans have is to be as critical as possible. That’s my function – but I wouldn’t say purpose because I don’t think we have a purpose apart from the ones we invent for ourselves,’ says the former teacher.

‘What am I meant to talk about? My virtues? My vices?’ She goes off to get a cigarette, claiming that it bores her to think about herself. I kept thinking she might be a prima donna, that she might throw a wobbly – but nothing like that happened and she remained scrupulously polite. ‘I think I’m kind. I’ve got a good sense of humour – I take pleasure in amusing myself and knowing that what amuses me will amuse others.’ She clearly enjoys making fun of herself. ‘More than anything at all really really really I am unorthodox. It’s like completely instinctive – I’m never satisfied to do things the way other people do them, never was.’ She’s also concerned about genius and style and being an artist.

Although pedagogic and serious, she seems light and content with herself. ‘I’m sorry if you think I’m complacent.’ I don’t, just content. ‘I suppose that’s because I had a sane mother who loved me and thought me wonderful.’ Her mother was a cotton mill worker, her father a grocer. ‘The other reason is that I really don’t care about myself – and also because I’m doing what I want.’

Is she an anarchist? ‘I’ve been asked that – but it was such a long time ago that I’ve forgotten what I’m meant to say . . . I think I’m a civilised woman. I can’t imagine myself killing anyone – and you have to ask yourself that sort of question if you say you’re an anarchist.’

And is she eccentric? ‘Yes, undoubtedly – and proud to be so in such an age of conformity.’ Shy? ‘Well, funnily enough, I am shy until I get in front of people. I hardly ever use the telephone.’ Vulnerable? She appears to be so – and friends have described her as a marshmallow. ‘I don’t feel at all vulnerable – I never get upset about injustices to myself. I don’t care if I do get knocks, because I have faith in what I’m doing.’ She’s not rich. ‘But I think I’m going to be quite rich, possibly very rich. Oscar Wilde said, I never waste money, I spend it . . . My ambition is to have a salon, a base in the middle of town where you invite intellectuals to talk.’

And what about her relationships? She married dance hall manager Derek Westwood when she was 21; and she has a son by her erstwhile lover, former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. She gives brain stimulation priority over that of the body. ‘I don’t mind if I don’t have a relationship because I love to be on my own so much. But I’m a very loving person.’ She lives alone in Clapham, in the flat she’s had for 20 years. She’s choosy about men and often finds relationships too much of a compromise.

‘I’m quite happy not to have sex again until the day I die. I can manage without it.’ Don’t you like sex? ‘Oooh, I think it’s brilliant.’ She wants an uncomplicated relationship, but doesn’t have the time to look for one. ‘I wish men would proposition women more and that I could proposition men. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, a little recently on somebody – but I’ve given up.’ (Little laugh.) ‘They say art and creativity are a sublimation of sexual drives – and maybe that satisfies me. You know, what do you call this thing where you do it yourself, you’ll have to give me the technical word, ah yes, masturbation – I find that very satisfactory.’