Picture a busy London thoroughfare. Outside a faceless bank stands an immaculately groomed woman. As she opens her expensive purse, her credit card drops to the pavement. The fashionable lady looks down, but doesn’t pick it up. After a while, it becomes apparent that she cannot move. Her jeans, the latest high-waisted flares from the hot new brand 18th Amendment, are so fantastically tight that her trunk is frozen into an upright position. Any attempt at bending, stretching or reaching is simply pointless. Her credit card remains on the ground until a kind stranger retrieves it.

Such scenes are being played out all over the land as a growing number of women fall victim to debilitating fashion syndrome (DFS). Sufferers allow their fashion choices to hamper their ability to lead a normal life. A tendency to wear jeans so tight that they prohibit movement, or heels so high that walking becomes impossible, is the primary symptom.

Bev Malik, fashion buyer at the London boutique Browns, is a self-confessed DFS sufferer. Her favourite jeans are the aforementioned high-waisted flares. “I can’t do anything normal in these jeans,” she says. “I can’t bend. And you can forget food – it’s liquids every two hours, and not too much, at that. They have taken over my life. I can’t even wash up.” Malik may be disabled by her denim, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. “Short of surgery, you won’t get a waist like this without them,” she says.

So committed are DFS sufferers to wearing the latest trends that they freely admit to waving goodbye to comfort and mobility. “I don’t have a life when I’m wearing my red Balenciaga spikes,” says Joanna Jeffreys of the department store Harvey Nichols. “It’s like walking on pointes. But the worst are my Louboutin Gwenissimas. They’re so high that I’ve become banister-reliant. My days of walking down the middle of the stairs are over – there has to be a banister, or I can’t move.”

Presumably, her taxi bill is astronomical? “It’s outrageous. In an ideal world, the pavements would be those moving walkways at Heathrow. Now that’s how to walk in Louboutins.”

It’s not only women who are affected. One male stylist attended a recent party in jeans so tight that, rather than engage in anything as pedestrian as walking, he swung his legs one in front of the other with the exotic gait of a tin-legged Douglas Bader. His thoughts on his affliction: “Darling, I’ll be fine. Champagne takes away the pain.”

Scratch the surface of DFS, and the lives of its sufferers grow increasingly bizarre. The ultimate splinter group, DFS extreme, if you like, have detached themselves completely from the real world. One all-powerful editrix-in-chief recently joined a gym and went once, never to return. The fearsome fashionista couldn’t understand why her personal trainer wasn’t keen to let her on the treadmill in her Chanel platform sneakers with diamanté double Cs and dinky bows. Then there is the talented fashion stylist who thought it would make perfect sense to wear next season’s double-faced bouclé wool jacket by Chanel to the beach. While everyone around her lay in swimwear, she stood defiantly in the sweltering 85F heat, peering at the bronzed bodies with mild disdain.

One high-powered fashion insider has such an extreme wardrobe that it requires an entourage: one helper to carry the three designer handbags she routinely totes, and another to cling on to for support when she totters around in impossible heels. “She threads her arm through mine, and we’re off. Well, she hobbles and I drag her,” says her appointed walker. “She’s not interested in living a normal life; it’s all about the clothes and shoes.”

DFS has a historical precedent: Marie Antoinette in her enormous wigs and panniered gowns. In her day, extreme and debilitating adornment was a sign of great wealth and importance. Swap 18th-century panniers for 18th Amendment high-waisted jeans and you can see how DFS has become a modern expression of luxury and power. The taxi addict who refuses to use public transport because it would ruin her Jimmy Choos is saying: “I’m special, because I can afford to exempt myself from normal interaction.”

Sadly, there’s only one cure for DFS: penury.

Times recommends

• Live chat: Thrifty ways to update your winter wardrobe
• Is anybody out there really listening?
• Nutrition Q&A: Will eating late make me fat?