Ever since the spring and a marvellously OTT Chanel show, in which the models strutted around an enormous iceberg airlifted into the Grand Palais, dressed in jackets and dresses and jumpsuits all fashioned from fluffy fake fur, I've had a hankering for a chubby.
Yes, a chubby. As in a fluffy, shaggy, shortish, Seventies-ish (fake, in my case) fur — and, yes, that is a real name. And recently I got one.
I felt sort of Chanel yeti/Carine Roitfeld crossed with Beyoncé. And then I got home and my husband said: "Hello, why are you dressed as 50 Cent?"
Which left me somewhat deflated. But I'm not easily swayed — certainly not in this coat — and anyway, the chubby has always attracted controversy.
A poison-green fox chubby starred in the 1971 Yves Saint Laurent collection in which he scandalised the Paris Fashion Week by paying homage to the style of Second World War Parisiennes. Collaboration chic went down like a lead balloon but the fur chubby became a YSL classic.
What I like about the chubby is the way you bowl through life like a galleon in full sail. People literally flatten themselves against walls to let me pass. I thought they were being polite at first, then catching sight of myself in a shop window, I was reminded of those full-length Holbein portraits of Henry VIII, wide as he is tall, a cube of velvet pomp on Mr Man legs.
He looks ridiculous, yet simultaneously slightly intimidating. And if that's not a good template for a fashion editor, I don't know what is.
