Sex and Abu Dhabi? It’s wrong for the iPad era

Sarah Jessica Parker and her famous tutu are way out of date — today’s fashion has to be functional as well

Is an insult still an insult when the object of the insult hasn’t registered it? I was explaining to my husband why I couldn’t face going to any of the screenings for Sex and the City 2 when my 14-year-old daughter walked through the door and announced that she and four friends had just been to see it (certificate 15, BTW). “It’s great, you’ll love it,” she told me.

Isn’t it sexist, ageist and racist? I asked. Doesn’t it reduce four formerly smart women to irritating, squealing, Louboutin-craving, solipsistic, man-obsessed idiots? Don’t you feel patronised? “ She looked blank. I cut to the chase. “Aren’t the clothes horrible?” “Yup, gross,” she agreed. “But there are some really funny jokes, especially the one about Jude Law. The whole cinema was in fits.”

I give up. The Jude Law Joke has been singled out for special opprobrium in the universally damning reviews. Not that the critics are foolproof. They all panned Mamma Mia!, mainly for being silly, which it was, but in a benign, guilt-free, uplifting way. It was also a misty-eyed view of anti-materialism and free love.

By contrast, the general consensus seems to be that SATC2’s release is about as timely as six-month-old carrion. Yet there isn’t an overwhelming body of evidence to suggest we’ve all become capitalist-defying ascetics. The only barricades being manned at the opening party of Louis Vuitton’s megastore in London last week were the ones being gently leant on by fans waiting to catch a glimpse of Kirsten Dunst, Catherine Deneuve and Cherie Blair (shouldn’t she really have been storming a barricade?) as they swept past on the red carpet.

So if my daughter and her friends, all of them bright and pretty worldly, don’t feel abased by SATC2 (forgive them, they know not what they Choo), perhaps the only problem lies with those who are looking for ways to be affronted by it.

But that still leaves SATC guilty of a heinous betrayal. Four TV characters who once brilliantly and wittily showed that a deep and abiding love of fashion could exist inside intelligent, self-supporting life-forms have morphed into embarrassing freeloaders. So fashion is back to square one.

Really, though, I’m much more interested in seeing the other fashionable, slender trendsetter that debuted last week. The iPad could end up wresting the fashion baton from the gnarled hands ofSATC. With its gorgeous lines, sleek graphics and swish page-browsing, it could have been designed specifically for the Net-a-Porter crowd and catwalk-news junkies. If Apple can come up with an app that casts a crow’s foot-blitzing glow on the face every time it’s switched on, they’ll clean up. Think how pretty the front row will look when they all get out their Eye Pads at the next round of shows.

At any rate, if the industry has been fretting about what would replace the cash cow It bag, the answers here: “It” iPad cases. Already an enterprising Aussie designer has come up with some (admittedly hideous) pouch dresses for carrying them around.

Perhaps values have changed. Last week three more fashion houses installed low-key names where big marquee presences formerly resided — Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen, Christophe Lemaire for Jean Paul Gaultier at Hermès and Giles Deacon (who though familiar to Brits is unknown abroad), instead of Lindsay Lohan at Ungaro. Not that they’re low-key talents — Burton, for example, was McQueen’s right-hand woman for more than a decade — but they’re not the flashy, starry types that wereSATC’s bread and butter.

Perhaps the geeks are inheriting the earth: the developments in clothes that have most resonance these days are technological ones. Or they’re about innovative fabrications, whether it’s Uniqlo’s sell-out Heat-tech (aka thermal) range , this summer’s cooling underwear, the ultra-light, windproof down coats and jackets that are climate-perfect most of the year round, or Acne and Alber Elbaz’s influential denim collection (top) last year.

That collaboration is proving highly influential. Taking denim out of jeanswear isn’t new, but until Elbaz got hold of it, no one used it in such a decorative way.

Those Acne/Lanvin denim dresses with their ruches and bows are turning out to be the perfect solution for sophisticated, not too formal, day-through-to-night dressing.

A tailored dress that can be tossed in the washing machine may not sound like a glamorous story, but in the end it’s one that will have more impact on the way we dress than SATC’s tutus and corsages.