Given the severity of the weather this winter it's perhaps only to be expected that snow boots – at all different price points and ranging in appearance from the very ungainly to the more ungainly still – are high on any retailer/fashion PR/person with cold feet's agenda.

It stands to reason that anyone attending the twice-yearly women's ready- to-wear collections, currently in full flow, is likely to find their wardrobe scrutinised to a point more associated with fashion life than anything even approaching reality.

Steve. I love Steve. My hips are hugged like they've never been hugged before. I feel warm and protected, inside and out. And, no, Steve isn't a man – he is my favourite-ever pair of jeans. You need him in your life.

Fashion cliché of the week: opposites attract. And so, as sure as eggs is eggs, what the latest issue of British Vogue describes as "the new pretty", duly identified as among the leading looks of the spring season, is inevitably rubbing shoulders with, er, the new utilitarianism.

Do I look like mutton?" my friend, S, asked me at last season's shows. She was wearing skinny, black-leather Balenciaga trousers and, no, I told her, she did not. Stick-thin and fashion-ed up to the nines, she looked formidable, a somewhat fearsome sight at the school gates, for sure, but age had little to do with that.

Raspberry and violet. Aubergine and flame. Plum and chartreuse.

January, like August, is traditionally the month given over to the not- entirely-statistically-rigorous-but-entertaining-nonetheless fashion/lifestyle survey. And so, thank you, MyCelebrityFashion.co.uk, for your effort, dutifully documenting what a little more than 1,500 men, aged between 18 and 30, love to hate about women's fashion.

As Shakespeare might have said if he'd worked in fashion, "To walk or not to walk the streets in knitted snow boots covered in frolicking reindeer – that is the question."

You know that the January blues have well and truly established themselves when you find yourself, first thing on a Monday morning and with approximately 14 deadlines looming, watching re-runs of TV shows that you didn't much like in the first place.

New year, new fashion resolutions. Yes, yes, I know I do this every January – don't we all? – but this time, it's serious.

Browsing through an issue of Tatler magazine recently (as you do) I stumbled across the requisite Christmas lists, courtesy of some of this country's so-called style leaders. Whatever, I thought, pausing, nonetheless, at Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter's contribution. She's a woman whose fashion and business credentials to date have proved faultless, after all.

It's not that the Comme des Garçons designer, Rei Kawakubo, dislikes feminine clichés. Far from it. In the past, her visionary collections have featured hearts, flowers, pom-poms, polka dots, frills of all shapes and sizes and even more than a little powder pink all, however, in a wilfully contrary – even twisted – way.

To coincide with the long-awaited, much-anticipated nationwide launch of Dogs In Vogue – A Century of Canine Chic, by the estimable Judith Watt, here are a few fashionable dog anecdotes of my own. Dogs and fashion – they go together like a horse and carriage, it seems.

Models – like children – should be seen and not heard. Most recently, proof came in the form of Kate Moss who, promoting her latest fragrance, agreed to a rare – indeed, very rare – interview with Women's Wear Daily. Her choice of a paper aimed at industry insiders was a careful one. It did not protect her from mainstream attention, however.