RIFAT OZBEK, British Designer of the Year, has lost close friends to Aids, including the model and designer Tina Chow and the photographer Stevie Hughes. Ozbek, who co-founded Aids Crisis Trust, is now encouraging fellow fashion designers from around the world to join him in making an enormous quilt to commemorate friends who have died.

WHO WOULD have thought, a few years ago, that drag - that old staple of stage, panto and party - would pass into contemporary mores?

IN THE spring of 1993, Martin Margiela is possibly the most fashionable designer in the world. For years he was associated with the fashion underground. Most people within the industry knew his name, but few bought his clothes. He was loved only by hipper-than-thou fashion students and readers of i-D magazine. Now his time has come.

THE best thing about Boobs, Boys and High Heels, or How to Get Dressed in Just under Six Hours, the debut book from the sometime model Dianne Brill, is not that it tells you that cheap mayonnaise makes great hair conditioner or that lots of lip liner and powder will make your lipstick kiss-proof, but that it amply demonstrates how far self-belief can get you.

FETISHIST clothing, once the preserve of the sex shop, is moving into the fashion mainstream. The boom in bondage clothing has been inspired by designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Pam Hogg, who experimented with rubber, leather, PVC and shiny Lycra in the Eighties.

These days I feel a bit like that character in Monty Python's Life of Brian who exclaims 'I was blind but now I can see' before promptly falling down a ditch. After years of being quite blind without realising it, I have been prescribed a pair of glasses.