Now, female designers are getting their own back. At the menswear shows in Milan last week, two labels built in the image of their female figureheads put out autumn/winter collections that suggested things are only going to get tougher. After her show, Miuccia Prada told critic Suzy Menkes that her theme had been "the things that men usually do to women - it's revenge!"
Prada's male models had walked out in flashes of flesh-coloured fabric, trousers with frilled tops that looked like tutus, vests that stopped at navel height, and pants that poked above the tops of trousers like so manywomen's g-strings did for a spell in the late 1990s. A couple of days later, Marni, headed by designer-founder Consuela Castiglioni, put men in turtlenecked jumpers that ended just below nipple height and tops that zipped up at the back, ensuring that you would need a good strong woman's helping hand to get in and out of them. The designer even indulged in a bit of pointed name-calling - Marni's fur-coats were made of weasel.
Marni's soundtrack only seemed to intensify the sense of male disempowerment. Castiglioni's choice was My, My, Hey, Hey, the song Neil Young wrote to express his sense of irrelevance in the face of the punk explosion, and which Kurt Cobain quoted in his suicide note: "It's better to burn out than to fade away."
Chins up, though, chaps; these two designers seem to be suggesting another option. Provided you're young, slim and beautiful enough, you can instead devote your life to becoming a picturesque plaything for rich and powerful women.
