'The fashion show is over': what I have learned from 20 years of catwalks

As catwalks go digital for who-knows-how-long, our fashion critic looks back on two decades of attending fashion weeks

Fashion people love to exaggerate, but I have been to a lot of fashion shows– about 3,000, by according to my back-of-envelope maths. Mostly in London, Paris, Milan and New York, but also Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, Berlin and Edinburgh, Marrakech and Reykjavik. Twenty years of pret-a-porter and haute-couture collections – two of each every year, give or take two maternity leave gaps, a bout of appendicitis and the time I messed up my US visa – adds up to a lot of catwalk time.