Milan Ready to Wear Collections: The Inside Story Part Six. The end

To be honest, I LOATHE Milan. Grey, industrial, clogged with traffic and full of people who don't speak English. (In my defence, I’m hardly linguistically challenged: I speak fluent French and, um, Latin, but it's not easy trying to work so hard in a country where no one has any English.) You try six days in a car with a driver who has no English and gets left and right confused continually – which is no joke when you exit a show in the rain with five hundred other people, all of whom are hunting for their identical black cars which are crawling in traffic to get to the venue, and you are tried, hungry & grumpy, fed up with being elbowed in the exit melee by pushy assistants & bodyguards, wearing silly shoes and a by now wet and see through diaphanous dress in which you totter down to the left hand corner 200 yards away to wait for the car, only to discover he meant right which is now 400 yards in the opposite direction…. And you do that ten times a day.

I am now remembering the shin splints from high heel wearing (technically having a driver means no walking or standing, but there's always going to be waiting outside a venue by which time your driver has buggered off to eat panini & watch Inter kick soccer arse in some cafe for the next hour), and the continually rumbling tummy - take it from me, Haribo are not a nutritious or filling lunch - and the rain. It always bloody rains in Milan. And you can guarantee we'll all be wearing something that doesn't take kindly to wet. Feathers, silk frocks, suede open toe hooker shoes, vertiginous platforms that have no traction on rain sodden pavements.

But of course there is always the moment when something glorious happens and you get swept away on a tide of extraordinary and beautiful clothing that redefines the craft and you remember why you love your job....