Ambivalent young men – and there are lots of them in fashion – love parading their feminine side now and then, if not all the time. And we’re going through a “now and then” phase at the moment. The wild-child designer Gareth Pugh wore women’s clothes for Pop magazine. V Man magazine has male models posing in wide trousers, styled to look as though they’re wearing evening dresses. Men in fur stoles, diamond bracelets and hats with alluring veils are becoming common in male fashion magazines, not to mention the cooler clubs in Hoxton.

What’s it all about? Is it a celebration of the comedy inherent in full-on drag, as in La Cage aux Folles and Some Like It Hot? Is it a manifestation of the super-glamour of the international tranny scene (in the underground clubs, it’s all vertiginous heels, wigs and skintight satin minis and bodysuits, as shown here)? Is it a corrective to all the crude hooker looks that designers, especially in Italy, seem to believe real women actually want to wear? Or is it simply that willowy young men fall in love with their own beauty, in the same narcissistic way that Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel and their friends did in the 1920s and 1930s? That crowd had so much fun, dressed in a vaguely 18th-century way and daubed with industrial quantities of slap. Yes, they were homosexuals, but that is by no means automatically true of modern cross-dressers. The latter look no further than David Bowie or Russell Brand for their lead.

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