Johann Hari

It is 6pm and I am sitting on a bare white bench in the Natural History Museum. A few feet away, massed and angry crowds of fashionistas are trying desperately to break through, waving tickets and passes and howling like Zulu about to charge. Here, on the other side of the red rope-line, I seem to be living through the End of Days as envisioned by Orthodox Jews, because skeletons have risen from their graves and walk among us. Some of these meandering packages of gristle and bone have been smeared with cosmetics and pushed out onto a catwalk, where they are awkwardly jangling, as though their limbs were controlled by some invisible Geppetto. I am sitting opposite Lizzie Jagger and Jefferson Hack – a man who apparently is famous for inseminating Kate Moss – and we are applauding a dress that appears to be made entirely of tinfoil and rubber.

As I gape in flabby, flabbergasted horror, my guide – a woman who has covered this beat for decades – turns to me and says, “Welcome to London Fashion Week.”

This is not my natural habitat. As I watch the stick-models jangle, I remember I am wearing a skanky t-shirt I bought in Primark – five for £3.99 – and a pair of jeans I bought in a market in Congo for thirty pence and an old battery. I am anti-fashion made flesh. Lots of flesh. I feel like leaping on stage and force-feeding these models a cream pie. Suddenly a coathanger-woman elbows me aside, crying to another coathanger, “Flossie! Is that Hugh Grant over there?” It is. And yes, I am in a room with a woman called ‘Flossie’.

This story begins a few hours before, when a blaring song declares “I am my own special creation!” and a person struts out – I can’t determine the gender – wearing a huge swollen black jacket with wire propping it up inside, making a hideous contorted shape. His/her/its face is tightly covered with a tight spandex mask with strange cancer-shaped growths covering every hole. The room gasps and asks: how can the model breathe? Is it possible that having stripped food from the human condition, models are now trying to do without oxygen too?

The growths get bigger, the clothes get odder. This show is by the new king of “conceptual clothing”, Gareth Pugh. If an Orc wandered into Harvey Nichols in need of a party dress, his clothes would be ideal. But as soon as the show stutters to an end, I barge backstage to discover – can Orcs really be Gareth Pugh’s target market?

“When I die, I want to have my skin cut off and made into a leather jacket,” Pugh tells me by way of introduction, as his minions fuss around him. He is small and skinny and about my age, and immediately all of my questions vanish from my mind as I imagine wearing his dead skin. “Well, I think skinning you is an excellent idea,” I say. Ouch. Bad sentence. I quickly change the subject. Gareth, would you ever use a fat girl in one of your shows? “Hmmm,” he says. “Perhaps a winter collection. When you need lots of insulation.”

To prevent myself from committing murder with my bare hands, I stride away only to hear Judy Blame, his fiftysomething male accessories designer, exclaiming that Gareth is “the future! I was there when McQueen began and Gareth has the same magic!” I stop and ask him if he is uncomfortable sitting at the epicentre of global anorexia. “Darling, who cares?” he snaps. “I’ve had dinner with Kate Moss and she had a pie! I am sick of the media! Fashion is real life!” he exclaims. “And I think it’s disgusting you people keep attacking these poor girls!”

I explain – patiently, politely – that we are not attacking the models. We feel sorry for them. We are attacking the men who pick out these bone-thin girls as the exemplars of beauty, rather rehab-cases. But this is a rational argument, and too much for Judy’s mind. “Everybody loves fashion!” he cries. “Even somebody like you” – he casts an eye at my stomach – “has to buy clothes.” A pause, and as if to underline his point, he jabs, “And you are fat.” He says this word the way most people say ‘paedophile’. He clearly thinks this accusation of fatness trumps any rational argument. That’s it. He’s won. I’m fat. I am subhuman. My words simply melt into lard. I reply as softly as I can that some of us think it is more important to, say, read books or show personal kindness than it is to be bone-thin and worry about which particular piece of fabric covers our bodies. He looks blank. “Fat!” he exclaims, and flounces off.

This bone-thin boneheadedness rules Fashion Week. Later I bounce up to Erin O’Connor, the face of M&S, and joke, “I like your steak and kidney pies.” She looks at me blankly. I begin to quiz her and she answers in stilted corporatese. It’s like conversing with a corporate logo – as if Ronald McDonald or Mr Wimpy had gone into modelling. “I think any kind of eating disorder is unhealthy – overweight, underweight,” she drones, before insisting she has never – never – met a model who anorexic or bulimic, and she has never weighed herself. But then she adds, “My nose sometimes makes people feel uncomfortable. We all have imperfections.”

With every extra hour I spend with these people, I can feel my brain atrophying and bleeding out of my ears. But it is only last night – when I waddle into the Georgio Armani Party at Earl’s Court, the ticket so hot it’s combusting – that I finally lose the plot. Here they are, the massed rattling bones of the fashion world. This party has cost more than £2.5 million, with each guest getting more than £1000 lavished on them. The ice-buckets at the end of every table, I note, are glowing from an inner light.

While I gape, 50 Cent is performing a song about Da Ghetto and the massed white ranks of fashion are cheering along, impervious to the fact that he is talking about the people they spend tens of thousands of pounds on security systems to keep out. And I crack. I cannot ask another question about which designer these people like, or whether black is the new black. I will go mad if I do not talk about something serious. I stumble up to Callum Best and ask him what he thinks about the genocide in Darfur. He stares at me with a look of mild panic and mumbles, “It’s all right.”

I reel away and tell a thin girl there’s been a coup in Thailand. She looks horrified. At last! Some interest! Her brow furrows, and she asks, “Will it affect my drug supply?” In despair, I ask a Russia girl model called Ana Novgorod what she thinks about Iraq. “I love Abu Graib!” she exclaims. I pause. Pardon? “Abu Graib! It’s so original! And bold! Don’t you think? Have you seen it?” I cannot speak. My mouth flaps like a demented fish. “It was so clever. And she looks great!” I begin to wonder if London Fashion Week has driven me insane. Ana spots my distress and says, “You are talking about the shoot in Italian Vogue, right?” It is only hours later that I discover Italian Vogue this month really has done a photo shoot styled on the images of American torture in Abu Graib. And Ana thinks this is “bold.”

Enough. I run past the skeletons, past the designers, out into the cool night air, and I hail a taxi. “Take me to McDonald’s!” I cry. As I gorge on the sweetest Big Mac meal in history, I realise I would inject lard intravenously if it would mean I would never have to interact with the fashion world again. And then it hits me. These fashionista fools have dropped cluster-bombs of bulimia and anorexia into the minds of women across the world, and no matter how far and fast I flee, my female friends will never be free. My fashion week hell is their fashion-life.

You can read other articles I've written about the poisonous fashion industry here, here and here..