Do all male designers hate women? Having spent the best part of four weeks traipsing through East End warehouses, Milanese trade centres and Parisian galleries in glorious pursuit of their visions, I’m starting to wonder. There are, of course, exceptions: Paul Smith, Narciso Rodriguez, Matthew Williamson, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren — the list goes on. But amazingly often, the designers who have us on the edge of our seats, who set the “news” agenda, are a different matter.
It was the obscene lyrics about the female anatomy that opened John Galliano’s show for Dior in Paris that finally brought it all out in the open. It wasn’t so much the obscenity that grated as the virulently derogatory nature of the remarks. The smart reaction to