It's obviously sad that the fashion designer Alexander McQueen has died.

It's especially sad that apparently he should have taken his own life, at the tender age of 40 and in the pomp of his career; a creatively unfulfilled but widely loved man, whom darkness enveloped after the loss of his beloved mother.

Alexander McQueen ... "He changed the silhouette of trousers forever".

But could I also just say this: the fashion industry that he dominated is one of the least attractive legal activities on earth, populated by weirdo artists, freakish PRs and emaciated and mentally disordered models. To be even tangentially exposed to it is to enter a world of phoneys and airheads, mutually massaging the pointlessness of each other's professional existence, self-regarding to a degree that would make Narcissus blush, committed only to ripping off a market made docile by cocaine, champagne and the odd canape. Fashion is a chimera of a real industry, the absence of which would harm no one other than its self-serving catamites and courtesans. It is a disgusting place to make a living.

There. I just thought I'd make that clear, because nobody else seems to have done so over the past couple of days.