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Lagerfeld’s ideas of womanhood have nothing to do with family. His feminine ideal, he says, is about “being liberated from daily life and everything that is normal”. And that is what most women dream of when it comes to their sex lives — being somehow unhindered by the suffocating dirge of reality. “I like what the French call l’aventurière,” he says. “The image of the type of woman who has a past in her present life.

Oscar Wilde said, ‘I like men who have a future and women who have a past.’ I like the idea that with a woman we really don’t know.”

Of the Herzigova character in Room Service, he asks: “Is she a divorcée, an adventuress, a call girl, a businesswoman, a trophy wife, a spy?” Those are the career opportunities for Lagerfeld’s fantasy woman. Busy working mums don’t get a look-in. As the fashion insider says: “That theatrical side to gay men in fashion is what makes it thrilling. They idolise sex, glamour and beauty.”

The women who inspire Lagerfeld are not, then, on the way to the office. They are frequently long dead — mistresses and wicked manipulative rebels: the Comtesse du Barry; Madame de Pompadour; Colette; the French actress and lesbian lover of George Sand, Marie Dorval (“She said, ‘I’m not beautiful; I am worse’”); the famous early-20th-century harpsichord player who lived with three men at the same time. And then, of course, there’s the woman he describes as “a devil on earth”. His mother.

Tara Subkoff, the Imitation of Christ designer, was not the first person to observe that “fashion is a gay man’s profession”. The popular feminist argument is that gay designers are misogynists; ultimately motivated by their own sexual appetites, they force womanly curves into boyish angles, and toy with unpalatable themes such as rape, S&M and prostitution. Roland Mouret’s Galaxy dress, lauded for its artful sculpting of the female form, is an exercise in suffocating Victorian constriction; Alexander McQueen is accused of misogyny every time he sends a collection down the runway.

Yet the reason women adore fashion is that it presents us with exciting stories in which we are the stars. Tom Ford said last year that male designers “are more objective. We don’t come with the baggage of hating certain parts of our bodies”. Scrutiny of that undoubtedly true statement is probably best left to fashion experts, feminists and students of the politics of eating disorders. For now, let’s just enjoy the escapism offered by the fairy tale of clothes.

“My mother thought men were not that important,” Lagerfeld says. “She told me, ‘One can have a child with whichever man one wants, because women are the strength in life.’”

Lagerfeld’s fantasy woman is not only strong, but sexually free and confident. She is cruel and mysterious, and she is allowed a history — whether bad or good. She has style and wit. She is an ideal we enjoy because we have difficulty seeing her in ourselves. Mired in day-in, day-out womanhood, we lose the epic nature of ourselves. And it’s this, perhaps, that explains why pictures by a powder-haired, ponytailed gay septuagenarian can make a woman feel quite so sexy.

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