The tottering army who've sold themselves to Topshop

Add to My Stories Share I'm in a pub on Kensington High Street on Friday night. Actually, Im standing on the pavement, inches from the traffic, shivering. In this country, to have a good night out always, always involves hardship. Im with a group of young women who are doing their best to look as though they are enjoying themselves, but their shoes are pinching.
Most are in white, all the better to show off their St Tropez (the bottle, not the town) tans.

Appropriate? Girls on a night out, with their fake tan and false eyelashes have sold themselves out to Topshop (Picture posed by models)To a woman, they are wearing false eyelashes. No, they are not false, from a packet! one young woman with Eighties curls tells me, as though Id just wondered whether her gold clutch is from Primark (its not). They are extensions! They took two hours in a saloon [sic]!

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To say they look like prostitutes would be an understatement. Perversely, there is no flirting going on here, as they are too busy staying upright, pulling their skirts down, not smudging their lipgloss. I ask a group of lads, loitering nervously nearby, whether they assume these women are easy. They laugh. Theyre not easy, theyre difficult! So, its not about sex.
Every woman I talk to tells me shes dressed this way for herself and her friends. I speak to Victoire, a 21-year-old from Paris. She is wearing white broderie anglaise, with tiny shorts like a nappy above bare legs. I couldnt dress like this in Paris, she says. The men would be shouting things, making gestures, but here the men do nothing. Is she here for the weekend? No, I work for an investment bank.

Brash: Girls have the right to dress how they want, but they shouldn't forget their pride in their appearanceWe stagger round the corner to join the queue for the nightclub in the Kensington Roof Gardens. I watch two girls ahead of me: they seem to plough on their high heels, muscular thighs rippling beneath short dresses. Even the bouncers, sober chaps in black, roll their eyes as women spill out of cabs, all shiny mahogany knees followed by THE BAG and then the eyelashes.
Everyone is from somewhere else. I stand behind two blondes who wont give their names, but tell me theyve come up from Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. They are Valentino brown, with elaborate nails and knee-length asymmetric dresses. Is Cheryl Cole a role model? A 26-year-old who has never had children is hardly going to inspire the way we dress, says one. Were both mums in our 30s.
So why do you dress in this way? Do you think you have the right to wear whatever you want, no matter how short, and be safe?
The blonde on my left shakes her hair extensions. No, if a man looks at your legs, you cant blame him. And we make sure were safe. Were staying in a hotel, and weve booked a car tomorrow to drive us home.
Isnt that all a bit expensive? Yes. And? they chorus, seemingly as unaware of the recession as they are of the recent slutwalkers, who wanted to reclaim the streets and the name in response to the unreconstructed old fogey in Canada who used the term derogatively.

On your guard: Ken Clarke's (right) comments that some rapes may be worse than other seems to have passed some girls byKen Clarkes comments that some rapes might possibly be worse than others also seem to have passed them by. These women dont listen to the news, being far too busy lying prone in branches of Tanfastic.
I try to figure out why they dress in this way. Earlier in the evening, in another bar on York Way in Kings Cross, I! d had th is debate with an intelligent young woman in jeans and a black top. We have a right to wear short skirts, show our midriffs, anything, she said. Its nothing new. Look at how women dressed in the Sixties.
But the short skirt in the Sixties only lasted about three years. This very short, very young look has gone on for years. These women certainly appear more vulnerable than Jo Yeates, who was murdered despite her hoodie and rucksack. Maybe theyre not. But where they are assaulted is in the Burberry wallet.
By 1969, women realised the dolly-bird look was too labour-intensive, so they put on a maxi and flats, and stopped applying eyelash glue. Today, women are brainwashed into applying ever more layers of grooming, buying ever more things.
Even in the Sixties, women grew up and stopped shopping and clubbing. The big brands need us to go on consuming, hence the over-decorated mums. Looking young, saying Yay!, even in our 40s, is not about liberation.
Im going to order a Cosmopolitan, shrieks one young girl ahead of me, weaned not on a once feminist magazine but on episodes of Sex And The City.
Were here, outside this nightclub, not to reclaim the streets, but to line the pockets of people such as Sir Philip Green, the owner of Topshop. Weve been infantilised and prostituted for a reason.