Swapping M&S for S&M? How about adding...

This story is over a week old, but I've only just discovered it, and quite frankly, I find the story, or perhaps I should say the column, quite ridiculous.

Hilary Alexander's fashion tastes are as conservative as her newspaper's political leanings. So the idea of fashion incorporating ideas from the world of fetish fill her with dread. Exhibit A...

But is Dolce & Gabbana's 21st-century take on the chastity belt an amusing wheeze – no more than the next logical step from the corset and stiletto for eye-wateringly restrictive clothing? Is it art? Or, more worryingly, does it represent the acceptable face of a form of "fashion torture" – the tip of the iceberg in terms of catwalk trends which have troubling overtones of a darker fetishism more painful than whittling your waist with a metal belt that digs into your ribcage?

Masks, hoods, suffocatingly tight head-dresses and strange metal contraptions which literally "cage" the models' bodies have become a kind of acceptable modern catwalk currency among the avant garde and the fringe element. They are often beguilingly described in artistic terms, but to those outside the rarified world of the fashionista, these kinds of designs provoke only feelings of shock or repulsion.

Well, maybe to you Hilary, but to me and others, we feel no shock or repulsion at all. The idea of a modern day chastity belt might be a little scary, but like so many other things, fashion and style comes full circle, back to ideas that were long since forgotten. And in that spirit, Hilary brings up ideas that should have been long since forgotten...

However, the "modern society" trend that Pugh espouses is not accurate according to Dr Helen Nightingale, a clinical psychologist based in Cheshire (www.helennightingale.com) who says that manipulating women in this way goes back centuries.

Manipulating women??? Oh please! I thought that whole notion went out with women's lib! Times change, fashions change. PVC was thought back in the 60s to be the futuristic material, only to come a cropper at the hands of parafin heating. Now it's back. Shoulder pads were the in thing in 80s fashion, but the 90s fashions did away with them, now they're back too.

Have a read of the article, so you can see just how ludicrous the whole thing is. Fetish is not taking over fashion, but a part of it, and the sooner people accept that, the better for everyone.