Who's afraid of the catwalk?

Robert Altman got it wrong, argues Natasha Walter. Men, not women, are today's fashion victims

Robert Altman's unacclaimed new film Prt--Porter has a moral to tell about fashion. In one central plot-line, three editors of great fashion magazines - Vogue, Harpers Bazaar and Elle - debase themselves in front of a hot new male photographer. He exercises power over them with immense ease, by playing on their lack of self-respect, photographing them half-naked and circulating the pictures. The only possible response to such a vicious and miserable fashion world is that taken by a female fashion designer, who bites back by sending her models down the catwalk completely naked.

It's a flip idea, but one that still has its adherents. It goes like this: fashion demeans women. The fashion industry is in the hands of men who like to see women making fools of themselves. The only way out is to dump the whole thing. Although Robert Altman is no feminist, this is a classic feminist line of the Seventies, and one still put by those who hate to see women in thrall to fashion's mirages of beauty and glamour.

But is it the case that women who enjoy fashion must become fashion victims? Isn't there a way of enjoying clothes, the craft of couture, the drama of dressing up, without falling prey to the beauty myth?

It's a thorny question for feminists but one that cannot be brushed aside, since fashion intrudes even into our attempts to ignore it. There is a "look" that says Seventies feminism, just as there is a "look" that says Sixties flower-child. Punk, which stood firmly against traditional ideals of beauty and elegance, was supremely about fashion and dictated a precise range of possible sartorial responses. Similarly, grunge, fashion's Nineties' attempt to move in on unkempt hair and second-hand, ill-fitting clothes, made opting out look like opting in.

Movements like punk and grunge have broadened our range of responses to fashion, as have women's changing lives and increased personal freedom. Power-dressing, the fashion movement of the Eighties, is often ridiculed now as a pose that was more Dallas than British boardroom. But it was also a real attempt by designers to give women a uniform that would make them as unexceptional - as accepted - in offices as men are. In its more toned-down incarnations, it presented a way of dressing that was not about sex, but about status, that suggested nothing about femininity or availability and everything about money and efficiency. Thus it made those attributes, for women, look normal.

Although the excesses of the shoulderpad and gilt button may have fallen prey to the "what's in must go out" dictates of fashion, women do now have a uniform. A neat, put-it-on-and-forget-about-it tailored knee-length skirt suit or soft straight-leg trouser suit is seen everywhere from the House of Commons to Vogue, in colours from navy-blue to beige and back again.

Many women feel uncomfortable in that uniform, it's true. The ranks of Labour women, newly pressed into sheer tights and blobby earrings, look a little artificial. But as Labour's style adviser Barbara Follett says, "If you want to say something radical, wear a suit." Before long, we will stop noticing the Labour women's uniform, and our attention will focus solely on what they say and do.

Radical feminists who just don't want any part of the male system will find it easier to stick to colourful and casual - their fashion statement - as a short cut to stating their idea. But for women who want to enter clubs and council rooms, debating chambers and high-security offices, uniforms can only help.

They can also free women from the vagaries of traditional catwalk fashion. When Vogue declared, at the height of grunge, that the jacket was out, did Margaret Thatcher or Harriet Harman throw it away? Every day you can see women in short skirts and long, new and old, jeans and suits, saris and sports clothes. High heels may be "back", but women are sticking to trainers or flat pumps. This is a direct result of women's increased confidence about their self-definition and social status.

But fashion still has a place in a strong female culture. With many of our most respected feminist role-models, we can see a pure delight in fashion's swagger. Madonna in her Gaultier, Jodie Foster in her Armani, kd lang in her Prada, all strike nonchalantly powerful poses. Women writers love to detail and luxuriate in dress: Katherine Mansfield in a white dress and green stockings, Marguerite Duras in a man's fedora and lam shoes, Virginia Woolf in lemon, elbow-length gloves. In Doris Lessing's recent autobiography, she remembers herself as a young woman, making clothes for dances that would show off and delight in "my delicious body, that fitted me like a new dress". Surely we wouldn't want to throw away all that devil-may-care delight in pursuit of anonymous equality?

In fact, British fashion is broad enough to satisfy women's demands both for user-friendly clothes and dramatic dressing up. At the London fashion shows this week we'll see eccentric shapes by Britain's quirky genuises from Bella Freud to Rifat Ozbek, and some very forgiving ones by Britain's traditional fashion businesses from Jasper Conran to Jean Muir. British fashion is very close to the street, very close to real life; it filters quickly into the vast high street chains where British women like to shop. It is a humorous, amateurish trade compared to the massive rollercoaster fashion businesses in the States and on the Continent. It's fun.

There may also be a lesson for feminism in homosexual culture: that the arts of self-decoration and posing need not be seen as the attributes of a victim, but can be allied to serious power-seeking, and humorous pleasure-seeking. Certain women on the international fashion scene set a good example: Vivienne Westwood, Donna Karan, Suzy Menkes, Miuccia Prada, Lauren Hutton are none of them exemplars of the beauty myth's impossible ideals of seven-stone eternal youth, but all of them funny, individualistic women who take huge delight in the theatre and dynamics of clothes. They show us that fashion can be loved by women of all sizes and ages.

And men too. It is time for men to reclaim some of the delights of fashion for themselves. A start has been made: more and more men at work are falling for uncoordinated suits, untraditional fabrics, are leaving off their ties and adding sweaters. But there is still a long way to go. Earlier this year Paul Kara, who liked the way he looked in a skirt, lost a sex- discrimination case against Hackney council when he was told he had to wear traditional male clothing to work. Everywhere his case was reported with bemusement. Everyone seemed to think he was a little crazy to step so out of line. What may be OK for Jean-Paul Gaultier is unacceptable in the British workplace.

It shouldn't have to be like that. Think Louis XV in his dinky red heels. Think Teddy boys in their camp-it-up jackets and quiffs. Think the Nigerian Woodaabe men, beloved of television documentaries, and their languid, glamorous beauty contests. In a certain sense, men are the real fashion victims, restricted by their own dull norms. Far from Altman's catwalk world in which women are always underdolls, women are making fashion their own. And men can learn from that.