Replica Watches,Wemen's Handbags,Fashion Shoes

Byline: DYLAN JONES

They claim to have the monopoly on dress sense - but where's the logic in women simply buying what the fashion industry tells them to?

Like most men, I find women's fashion continually fascinating. Not from an aesthetic point of view, you understand, but more from an anthropological/consumerist one. Why, for instance, do they need to buy shoes the way most men buy cappuccinos? Why do they buy handbags the way that we buy chewing gum?

Men shop for clothes the way we shop for everything: we decide what we want, then we find out where it's sold, walk into the shop, buy it and walk out. Exocet shopping, we call it. And we like it that way.

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Women, on the other hand, and I defy anyone to say this is a sweeping generalisation, shop like cows graze. For them, window-shopping is not a leisure activity; it's a profession, a career, a calling. They window-shop in the way adolescent boys used to treat record shops. When I was 13 or 14, I could quite happily spend an entire Saturday endlessly flicking through the racks in my local record shop, relentlessly working my way from The Allman Brothers Band and Bad Company all the way to The Who and Frank Zappa, giving myself a sort of parallel education. It was comforting, in a way, to think that all these records were there should I suddenly decide I needed them, or could afford them.

I tend to think women shop in the same way - tirelessly, selflessly working their way up and down the high street, checking out the 150 different - though strangely alltoo similar - multi-pocketed beige leather evening bags ('New in this week!'), just in case they suddenly need to buy one (which, based on several hundred previous offences, they probably will).

However - and as I write this I'm fully expecting to be struck down by some sort of crystal-encrusted thunderbolt from Planet Fashion - are our womenfolk really the arbiters of all things sartorial? Because - and if the thunderbolt had second thoughts, it's bound to be on its way in a tick - they all tend to look exactly the same. All the time. While women take enormous pleasure in deriding men for all dressing alike, women dress in a far more similar fashion than they'd like us to believe.

A few years ago you couldn't walk around London without seeing those Westbourne Grove Hillbillies in their tasteful little training shoes and back-tofront baseball caps. Then the uniform changed to teeny-weeny, Gucci Ring itsy-bitsy, bright pink cardigans, mauve silk slipskirts with an ethnic hem, an enormously expensive pair of burgundy Blahnik heels and - to top it all - an immaculately sculpted handbag about the size of an avocado-androasted-tomato sandwich, which cost more than most people's cars.

And now - in case you haven't been taking any notice of what your girlfriend has been wearing these past few months - the fashion is for thick, wide belts tied tight at the waist (the best one is made by Yves St Laurent, although copies are everywhere), a long fitted T-shirt from C&C California, a pair of narrow trousers from Topshop or H&M, and a pair of high heels from just about anywhere.

And when our women come back from the shops, laden with armfuls of brightly coloured Bond Street carrier bags, they not only expect to be treated like Sarah Jessica Parker, Angelina Jolie, Kelly Brook or one of the other current sexually charged cover girls, they also expect a medal for buying a lot of clothes they've just seen in fashion magazines.

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