Hemlines are plunging and I'm feeling down American Vogue is running a headline on its website giving its readers "Ten Ways to Wear the Season's Midi Hemline." The pictures thereof are quite lovely, showing pretty print dresses and silk embroidered skirts at hem lengths ranging from an inch or two below the kneecap to an inch or two above the ankle, priced from around $500 to $1,500. I won't translate those dollars into sterling because there is little point. At this high end of the fashion market, anyone in the UK need only substitute a £ sign for the $, and that'll make it about right: the dollar price in New York is the same as the sterling price in London. I never know why that is: I know only that it's so. (And every American actor I interview marvels at it: Kirsten Dunst hired a Brompton bike when she was making that Wimbledon movie rather than pay taxi fares which were "the same price only in pounds." She said, "You think you're getting a bargain in H&M! But you're so not.") Me, I have to confess that I hadn't yet come to grips with the news that the Season of the Midi Hemline was upon us, since we country mice live for the most part in jumpers and trousers, stuffed into muckers - short bootees made of rubber that you fasten with Velcro, such as toddlers can manage by themselves. But what choice had we, after last winter? Anyway, we don't get a lot of practice wearing our London clothes with the right amount of knowingness and edge because when the weather is punishingly inclement, we go up to town as infrequently as possible. We may occasionally want to take in a talked-about show, of course, or undergo an orthodontal procedure before a daughter's wedding. But when we arrive in the Great Borisopolis on a wintry May day when icy rain blows sideways into one's eyes and hair, we gape about us like rustic halfwits. It's hard to whip up a desire to get the bus to Harvey Nicks and try on a rose-sprigged silk midi dress with no sleeves. The thing is that longer dresses and skirts have been supposed (for 50 years now) to signal economic turndown, while hemlines slashed to knicker level signal 1980s-style excess and loadsamoney and champagne. I admit that the very idea of loadsamoney seems impossible to imagine in this age of miserable austerity. Unless you have a family member who works for a Bad Bank, I suppose. Or in the House of Lords. Or at the Care Quality Commission. I am sceptical of the theory because modern fashion is more about sex than money. I can't remember much of import from the scary weekend when President Bush and Ben Bernanke kept appearing on the telly news saying little and looking white with fear. I certainly can't remember what I wore while watching them, unsurprisingly. But I do remember Black Wednesday in 1992, partly because it was in English money (a tender concern of mine), partly because the language used about it was semi-comedic (the ERM, for example, which always looked doubtful in newspaper headlines), and most of all because we're forever seeing retreads of it, because little David Cameron was in it, looking so pink and shiny and trying to keep out of camera-shot. But while what we wore in my office before Black Wednesday is lost to history, I know that afterwards, everyone's hem hit the floor. Bang. There was a fashionable line called Ghost that made crinkled dresses that Jane Austen could have worn; they hit a nerve and they were copied relentlessly, in black or white, by high-street chains. Never mind hovering below the knee - trailing along the carpet, more like. The girls in my office all looked like so many Elizabeth Bennets. Ignore this week's pictures of Royal Ascot, by the way. Gaggles of tippling girls, whether tattooed or not, who attend events in order to be photographed, tend to wear the kinds of clothes they know photographers like, ie very small, short, tight ones that display plenty of leg and/or plenty of bosom. Actually, forget the "or."