Now there’s a thing: Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, running about all over the place in — wait for it: THE SAME DRESS. The style empress, the woman who makes fashion designers quake in their Cuban heels and lays waste to entire collections with a single tilt of her military bob, has been photographed in no fewer than three different locations (Milan, London, Paris) wearing a Caroline Herrera dress festooned with indeterminate blooms.

In global fashion terms, this is momentous, bigger even than David Beckham’s boxer shorts. What adds to the sense of shock(and, in some quarters, outrage), is that she wore the dress in exactly the same way each time. This was not Wintour living out one of her own “Three ways to work the same piece” features; this was Wintour simply putting the same dress on, with the same accessories, three times in the same week. In other words, behaving like any other busy working woman with a limited wardrobe and a finite budget. How do we explain the inexplicable? Here are some suggestions:

- The zip is stuck and she’s too embarrassed to ask for assistance because she’s wearing Spanx.

- She lost her luggage flying into Terminal Five. Her other clothes are in lost luggage in Birmingham, which is not at all the sort of treatment they are accustomed to.

- She is channelling all our pain and working a new credit-crunch chic, in which one is simply sewn into one’s new clothes at the start of each new season and they are worn until they finally disintegrate (or become welded to the flesh).

- She has been the editor of the world’s fashion bible for so long that she has transcended all three-dimensional sartorial constructs and is now operating on a fashion plane so elevated that ordinary mortals cannot see it. It’s a bit like The Matrix, only with more sequins.

- It’s not her, it’s some crazed former fashion assistant who had to collect one batch of dry-cleaning too many. After years of painful plastic surgery, she has remodelled herself and is now setting about destroying Wintour’s reputation. The culmination of her evil plan is to appear in public wearing easy-fit slacks. The real Anna Wintour is languishing in a basement in Brooklyn. Quick, someone alert the fashion police . . .

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