Shallow Not Stupid

London Fashion Week, already the bastard child of the shows, has been upstaged by the Prime Minister. Designers and their dresses can’t compete with allegations about the leader of the sexually repressed world receiving fellatio from a dead pig to gain entry into the secret aristocratic society of Piers Gaveston.

You couldn’t make it up, and why would Lord Ashcroft want to? Porn revenge, perhaps? No pictures yet, but give it time. Dave is on record saying he had a “normal” student experience. My days as an undergraduate with farting wankers at drama school must have been abnormal. I never felt inclined towards either necrophilia or bestiality, though I did suffer students simulating sex with skeletons during my brief interlude at medical school.

The PM’s wife Sam Cam may be an odd choice to lead Vanity Fair’s best-dressed list, but you have to love a lady in red who sits front row at Roksanda on the day the world discovered her husband’s pig love. But let’s applaud Sam even if she does have a unisex name and poor taste in men.


This year LFW’s HQ has moved from Somerset House to Brewer St. car park, helping to “bring a buzz to Soho,” according to one of the organizers. Is she, like, deaf and blind? While you have to make allowances for crumblies, as long as they don’t smell, Soho is already buzzing and the streets are too narrow for all those big-bummed old burds who work at glossies. Of course, Brewer St. is restricted to the faux shows for people from the burbs who pay to get in, like the three large ladies who had “stood on a train for three hours” then not seen any celebrities. “Is the poor train all right?” I asked but they, rather rudely, did not respond.

The major shows pick their own venue, like Burberry in Kensington Gardens, complete with an orchestra and trenchcoated Alison Moyet singing live, distracting attention from the models in their see-through lace worn with big black pants. Which is a bit Kate Middleton as student model when she caught the eye of Windsor Willie.

Kate Moss, who made Burberry (a brand formerly associated with football hooligans and ladies who wet their knickers) cool, was perched front row with a depressing case of face bloat. She sat between Cara Delevingne, who appears to be growing a mustache, and this month’s UK Vogue cover girl, Sienna Miller — born again ginger and, defiantly or stupidly, wearing green fur. The Miller couldn’t keep her paws off Kate, or maybe she was just trying to get her freckly mug in-shot.

The Frows, with their botox faces and old knees peeping out of ripped jeans, are determined not to enjoy anything. Or maybe that’s just botulism paralysis. To be fair they’ve seen it all before, probs more than once.

Soho’s days of sleaze are numbered now that Stephen Fry is leading the charge to preserve its sex shops for any tourists daft enough to be abused in them. I’m sure Oscar Wilde was turning in his grave when the Fry guy played him in the biopic, with Jude Law as his wee balding boyfriend.

In Golden Square, where the shows are streaming along with the rain, I bumped into an old girlfriend of Mr. Lash’s — ok, I pushed her —who recently gave an interview about their ‘really bad break up.’ Fascinating as Mr. Lash is, it is bizarre that a magazine would want a kiss and smell about him a quarter of a century after he dumped the floozy, even if it was in Swedish. Say what you like about his exes — and I often do — but while some of them look like pigs after the unkind passing of time, none of them actually are pigs.

Read more about Vivien Lash in her evil twin Carole Morin’s novel Spying on Strange Men or download the audio book here.