I TRIED to drum up a bit of interest in the Kate Moss line at Topshop but just couldn't whisker up enough of myself to give a shite.

I think that's personal progress, especially for a woman who, at 40-plus, owns a Madonna at H&M chav-tastic tracksuit.

Armed security on the doors of Topshop branches in central London (well, not armed, but certainly very serious looking), riot police on stand-by, that sort of thing. When the first Primark (Penneys) shop opened in London's Oxford Circus people camped outside overnight and the police were called several times to separate women who were fist fighting in order to get their hands on sequinned mini-dresses for �10.99.

The day after Kate's groundbreaking collection arrived in-store I heard some hapless PR on the radio trying to justify the hysteria by explaining:

"Girls can walk in here and buy a waistcoat, a pair of shorts and some ankle boots and thenf" Then what? Climb Mount Everest? Wrestle Brad from Angie? Run for US presidential election? ". . . they are dressed just like Kate!"

It is not disaffected youth or bad politicians that are most likely to elicit the cliche, "What is the world coming to?" but women shopping.

So here it is once and for all. If you go into a popular high-street store and spend a few hundred euro on half-sewn, dodgy-seamed clothing doubtless made by poverty-stricken labour in a third-world country it will not, ever, under any circumstances help you look like Kate Moss or Madonna. Ever.

I know this because I have tried it and it doesn't work. Buying clothes because they look nice on famous people, or because you saw them in a magazine, or because they are really, really cheap is stupid.

When I say it like that I know it's true; however I am still unable to control the homing device in my brain which guides me into a branch of Penneys on an almost daily basis to buy legwarmers I don't need and miniature lingerie which chaffs . . . I am hopeful that my Madonna tracksuit (ruched at the bust, nylon, sparks in the dark) may have cured me.

My husband finally made me put the jacket in the bin last week. I am allowed to wear the bottoms with a plain sweater on top but the double ensemble is gone.

So in it went to the Vincent de Paul bin-bag mountain that is my conscience alleviator. Then I heard a lovely posh woman on the BBC say this week that all this cheap crappy clothing that we chuck in the recycling bin is worse than useless.

Much of it ends up as landfill as it is such poor quality and so badly made that it can't be sold in the shops where it goes to be sold in developing countries.

If we bought fewer, properly made clothes, poor people would benefit more. For the same reason developing nations are insulted by our sending them our out-of-date processed leftover food . . .

they also do not appreciate our 'two for the price of one' high-fashion tatty cast-offs . . . even if they come with the labels still on.

The chances are if you're not going to wear a faulty lemon-yellow boob tube, neither is anyone else, no matter how poor they are.

So before you drop that nasty fashion mistake in the charity collection bag . . . think on. Perhaps it would be better used for stuffing a cushion? Or better again, don't bloody buy it in the first place.