Fashion should focus on its best customers – and they’re not 20-year-olds

Walking between shows down the Avenue Montaigne in September, I was struck by the sight of a woman in a perfectly fitted pencil skirt and a blazer with shoulders so sharp they could give Martha Stewart’s tongue a run for its money. Smoking a cigarette and coolly berating the man she was speaking with in thickly accented French, her eyes were heavily rimmed in kohl, her hair stylishly tousled. She was in her 60s, maybe, and looked her age – and utterly fabulous.

OK, so it was Carine Roitfeld. But let’s put aside the fact that Roitfeld was editor of Paris Vogue for 10 years and focus on what I saw, underneath her celebrity: a grown woman in perfect command of her personal style, unafraid to show it. It’s a Parisian thing, for sure (everyone knows the real sartorial star of Emily in Paris is Emily’s boss, Sylvie), but it doesn’t have to be confined to the French capital.