And so the circus begins again...

The preliminary schedule for Mercedes Benz Fashion Week has just been announced. No huge surprises there, bar the already announced credit-crunch absences of Betsy Johnson et al.

Frankly, the shows are becoming one big waste of time: the images & video are on style.com and elsewhere on the internet, the biggest buyers of fashion aren’t necessarily in the same climate zone as Europe so the traditional Fall and Spring/Summer seasons are increasingly irrelevant, and the enormous cost of being at the collections for designers, and the bloated teams of buyers & editors has become extraordinarily hard to justify.

I’ll be posting more on this later but thought, with the advent of show season, that this would be a good time to start a series on what it’s really like to attend the shows as a senior editor, perched in the front rows. I’m going to start with Milan for the simple reason that a few months ago I wrote some briefing notes on the scene at the Milan collections for a Hollywood screenwriter, which ended up becoming a rather long, and very cathartic essay. First installment to follow.