Yesterday, London Fashion Week began, ensuring much of the coming week will be dominated by foaming discussion in "style" circles over what's in, out and shaking it all about. And curiously enough, exactly one week before that, a hitherto never-before-heard phrase fell to my astonished ear.

"Wow," said a complete stranger, "I like your shoes. Cool!" And it wasn't even sarcasm. Me, I love shoes as much as the next man (and men can be worse than women, ask Paul Weller) but historically speaking, no-one has ever liked the shoes I wear.

My kind of shoes, in fact, the kind you might call "stupid shoes" - retro affairs with giant buttons on, boulder-sized comedy-platform numbers, white square-toed panto affairs with silver buckles - were more likely to elicit the following response: "Pthrthrthrt!" followed by uncontrollable laughter.

Or, in the case of the colossal fluorescent orange and green metallic cyber-platforms much-beloved in the early 90s, on contact with the best pal back in Scotland, "pthrththrthrtht!" followed by uncontrollable laughter, followed by "Slade!", followed by an eardrum-detonating holler of "Iiiiiit's Chriiiiiiiiistmaaaaaaas!" Cheers. Didn't think much of your pansy purple allegedly crushed velvet "pumps" either, dude. And furthermore, you're still wearing them whereas I have moved on. (Possibly momentarily.) And so last week saw the first outing of a brand-new pair of shoes which, although retaining an element of "stupid" - five-inch suede peep-toe wedge affairs in horizontal black and grey stripes - were greeted by not one but three separate "I like your shoes", two "cool!" and one "I love your shoes!" Certainly, it must be said, the shoes were unavoidable - 15 people splayed on the ground at a chum's birthday party in his garden - but nonetheless, everyone else's equally visible shoes were entirely ignored, and so these shoes - my shoes! - were the undisputed shoe champs of the night. And there's no doubt about it; someone tells you they "love!" your shoes and you are not only going to feel good about yourself, you are going to feel fashionable (which suddenly feels great), literally remarkable, and quite possibly astonishingly attractive.

Even if dancing all night in your fabulous shoes causes so much use of the hitherto dormant calf muscles that you're in agony for days afterwards and, according to one unimpressed onlooker (another good friend, - I should really get some new ones), you are now "walking about like Clive Dunn. Grandad! Graaandaaad!'" Cheers. Was better off with "Iiiiiit's Chriiiiiiiiistmaaaaaaas!"

And so this week the race is on, once again, to find The Latest Shoe, alongside the latest everything else, to officially define the forthcoming fashionable season, spring-summer 2008 already. For most of this year, the proper fashionable lady has endured the tyrannical reign of the celebrity favourite, the Yves Saint Lauren Mary Jane Tribute platform (towering six-inch stiletto with what appears to be a wagon wheel nailed to the sole). Now this is about to be swept away by the stratospherically vertical Fall 2007 John Galliano's Dior range, which heralds, say the shoe experts, the end of several years of the ubiquitous platform caper.

Like a supernova exploding overhead, Galliano's range is less "shoes", more "amalgamation of 70s clod-hoppers with 10-inch heels, espadrilles from the 1980s, criss-crossing half way up the leg and a state-of-the-art fluorescent rubber kettle with an over-sized handle for a heel". These herald - continues the esteemed shoe expert who calls himself "Manolo The Shoe Blogger" (an internet phenomenon who is to shoes what Perez Hilton is to gossip) - "the final decadent period before platforms leave the scene for a few years. You have until perhaps the end of the year to enjoy them."

Which means, therefore, one week after the world was "loving" my new platform shoes, they are destined, in a matter of moments, to become the definition of fashion pumpkins.

Worse, in the very same week these shoes were purchased, I caved in - after all of these months! - to the wafting, mimsy, matronly smock, the year's must-not-have fashion calamity most women have purchased in desperation because there was nothing else on offer. The very next day, I walked into a newsagent where a weekly fashion magazine blared on its cover: "Smocks: It's Over!" Which meant I'd turned, overnight, from Miss Cool Shoes In A Cutting Edge Floral Smock 2007 into one giant pumpkin wearing two smaller pumpkins on its feet, somewhere in a field in Kansas in 1938.

This, then, is fashion at its most fickle and mercilessly cruel; at the very microsecond you step into its treacherous fold, it spits you straight back out again, the soul of the highly fashionable destined to dance forever through some twirling double helix of instant gratification and profound dissatisfaction, forever chasing the next casual-encounter high. Unless, of course, that's exactly what you love about it.

And if so, this forthcoming season is surely the one for you, a direct reaction to the last one; all patent, zips, pin-thin old-school stilettos and the restrictive shapes of the perv-togs known as fetish. Me, I'll still be wearing my hideous sturdy platforms and tragic billowing smock with, if not exactly pride, then a hard-won reminder of why some of us choose to stay, literally, out of fashion forever. As our grandfolks used to have it, in the fashionable way of their day: Today, you're the cock o' the walk; tomorrow, a feather duster.