Wrap up well if you're going out

Sometimes I think fashion stays awake at night, filing its glossy claws and thinking of new ways to taunt me. Last year - I never say "season" because I am not a fashion idiot - it was the Smock Dress. Do you remember the pain of the Smock Dress? Do you remember how it flapped around your sagging middle, making you resemble a giraffe that is wearing a parachute? "Did you know," said a female passer-by when I was out and about in the Smock Dress, "that you should not smoke when you are pregnant?"

There must have been an It-dress the year before - I rarely say It-dress, because it implies dresses have personalities, which they DON'T - but thankfully it has been blacked from my memory. (I think it had something to do with Rachel Weisz, but I may have dreamt it). But this year - OK, season - we have a new garment - OK, It-dress - to make 95.3 per cent of women look like idiots, whether they wear it or not.

Say hello to the Bandage Dress.

Now I like the name because, no doubt inadvertently, it tells us a truth about fashion. Fashion lives to convince us that women are all damaged and we need to buy clothes to fix ourselves. Like, er, bandages. So it's not just a dress, it's a metaphor, and that's included in the price.

The 2008 Bandage Dress is an archetypal It-dress because very few women look good in it, which is the whole point of an It-dress. Yearn, buy and still you are not good enough and so buy again - that is the It-dress manifesto.

It was unveiled by Azzedine Alaia and Herve Leger in the Eighties and it is made of strips of elasticated fabric, so when you are wearing it you are essentially naked, but covered in string. It has now been resurrected for 2008, like Dracula, by someone called Max Azria, whom I've never met but now I hate with a passion I normally reserve for Kim Jong-il and the Muppets.

In the past few weeks, the usual professional beauty suspects have dragged their bodies down the red carpet in the Bandage Dress, looking naked but covered in string. Kate Winslet stepped out in a bandage the other night to promote her new film, The Reader - what does The Reader read, apart from Vogue?

Cheryl Cole, my celebrity hate figure du jour, has been spotted wearing a green one, which made her resemble a talking Murray Mint with mad and vacuous eyes. (But it gave her breasts, at least until the bandage came off). Rachel Stevens (of Strictly Come Dancing), Emily Maitlis (of Newsnight) and Lindsay Lohan (of Rehab) are all wearing bandages.

It makes me weep and want to buy real bandages for the women who are maimed by fashion. On the plus side, one might unravel and expose some interesting celebrity surgical scars. Meanwhile, until the New Year (next season) and the next murderous garment (It-dress), I'll be hiding under the bed with a copy of Vogue and a razor blade.