On the cover of Simon Doonan’s new book is a chic-looking (vintage?) straitjacket with a dangling price tag. Famed for his outrageous windows for Barney’s New York, and a wry fashion observer, Doonan obviously wants to make it clear that, as far as he’s concerned, fashion is one crazy business.

In his first chapter, Doonan shares how he and a good friend who works in a psychiatric hospital often compare war stories.

“Whose world is more demented?” asks Doonan. “The world of the insane or the world of the insanely fashionable?” (He adds that his pal’s interns, inspired by the “unconscious fashion daring” of the clientele, play an extremely politically incorrect — though startlingly challenging — game called “Inpatient or Williamsburg Hipster?”)

Given what we are all supposed to be rushing out and filling our closets with this fall, however, the release of Doonan’s The Asylum seems almost uncannily timely, as fashion appears to be retreating ever more away from reality into a crazy house all its own.

To wit: in a time of climate change, when the polar ice cap is melting like an ice cube left out on the kitchen counter and we don’t really know what kind of winter to expect or whether we will ever see real snow again, this fall is all about . . . big coats. Tom Ford has sent his models down the runway layered in chokingly hairy fur up to the neckline.

Altuzarra and Fendi are recommending fur mittens and fur-trimmed stilettos. I pity whoever opts to wear head-to-toe Alexander Wang, which involves, over a long grey coat, huge fur mittens and a grey-knit balaclava.

Exotic species may be so diminished by now that they don’t even show up on endangered lists, but that shouldn’t stop everyone from Diane von Furstenberg to Proenza Schouler from covering everything from jackets to skirts in the weirdest, wildest furs, feathers and skins. A wildly feathered gown from Gucci, in which Olivia Wilde posed for the cover of Fashion magazine’s September issue, turns the starlet into a fashionably tattered bit of taxidermy.

OK, so fashion is supposedly apolitical, but at a moment in history when women are increasingly pushing back against male violence around the world, is it really necessary to send a model down the runway in the rain-wet hair, runny makeup, random fur jacket and panties of a desperate street hooker, as they chose to do at Saint Laurent, Marc Jacobs and Vuitton? Ditto the full ’50s skirts at Rochas and Dior. What do they have to do with women today who are the breadwinners for their families?

Of course, fashion has always preferred fantasy over the here and now. As the late, great Diana Vreeland, of the Geisha hair and Kabuki makeup for day, once famously quipped, “exaggeration is my only reality.”

If fashion wants to be seen as a true art form, however, one that reflects the concerns and issues of our time — and it could, despite its commercial roots (hey, the art world is also commercial, and art too is a product) — perhaps instead of spending its creativity running away, it could show us a way forward.

Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com .