16.

We used to take the children camping at our friends John and Lea Hoerner’s house, Cornwell Glebe, near Chipping Norton. The tents were pitched on the lawn, yards from the back door, since the seven-year-old campers seldom made it through the night, retreating to their bedrooms well before dawn. But we loved our weekends at Cornwell Glebe.

John was the big boss of Harvey Nichols, Debenhams, Topshop and most other high street fashion chains – the most powerful man in British fashion – and also Chairman of Battersea Dogs Home; their house was overrun with abandoned mutts they had rescued, seldom fewer than ten, sprawling in the kitchen and racing joyfully round the garden in packs. American-born Anglophiles, John and Lea’s Cotswold manor house was a hymn to Englishness and English style, but always with the latest gadgets and state-of-cool barbecues and waffle-makers. John was stocky and powerful, very slightly resembling in his appearance John W. Pepper, the Louisiana sheriff from the 1973 Bond movie Live and Let Die; he would appear in the kitchen each morning in stripy chill-proof pyjamas to prepare waffles drenched in maple syrup, piled high on a platter.

He was also Chairman of the British Fashion Council and wanted to stop; being Chairman of the BFC is one of those thankless pro bono positions that you aren’t allowed to relinquish until you find a gullible successor prepared to take it on. One weekend, over lunch, John craftily seated me between two flattering, persuasive fashionistas, and before I knew it, I’d agreed to do it. Little did I know what lay ahead.

The offices of the British Fashion Council at 5 Portland Place were peculiarly shared with several other fashion bodies and associations, including the Knitting & Clothing Export Council and the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers. The Fashion Council represented the glamorous, glitzy wing of the industry, responsible for staging biannual London Fashion Weeks and the British Fashion Awards, as well as promoting young talent and British designers. Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Paul Smith and Burberry were the star attractions, padded out with fifty more British designers of sundry talent and fame, all of whom put on catwalk shows. The Chairman was expected to attend every last one of them, fifty shows a season, twice a year.

Council meetings were held in a draughty, spartan boardroom with twenty-five or so fashion big shots ranged around the table: a disparate group of mulish, carping blowhards, each with a private agenda and emphatic opinions. Department store chiefs and designers ran perpetual low-level skirmishes with fashion college professors and Cypriot garment manufacturers. We were a ‘big tent organization’, which meant everyone felt free to blurt out whatever they liked, as it entered their heads. After each meeting, I felt bludgeoned and drained, and it took guile and effort to keep things on track.

I suggested we spruce up the boardroom with framed photographs of the top 100 British designers, like photos of celebrity customers in an Italian restaurant. It would remind us who we were there to help. But the BFC Chief Executive said, ‘Technically, Chair, only two of the four walls belongs to the British Fashion Council. If we were to hang photographs of Sir Paul Smith and Alexander McQueen on your two walls, we would need to do the same for union officials on the other two …’

But I came to love London Fashion Weeks. There would be ten fashion shows a day, held as inconveniently far from one another as possible. Half were staged in the official tented catwalk village, pitched on the Duke of York playing fields on the King’s Road, where I had once played sport as a Hill House pupil, or outside the Natural History Museum; the remaining shows were held in mind-numbingly edgy venues across East London, in skating rinks, former abattoirs, disused tube stations, decrepit Hoxton lofts or underground car parks. I would ricochet from one to another, ploughing through gridlocked traffic, minded by Fashion Week’s communications chiefs, Jane Boardman and Claudia Crow. I was devoted to them. Each day, some fresh PR horror erupted in the Daily Mail: this show was obscene, that one featured size zero anorexic models, another was a health and safety hazard; or else some government minister wished to attend a show and the designer didn’t want him on the premises. We lurched from crisis to crisis.

The Sunday Times fielded a camp old fashion reporter named Colin McDowell, who seldom enjoyed much in Fashion Week, and reminded us of Statler and Waldorf, the cantankerous grumps in The Muppet Show. What do you think of it so far, Colin? ‘Rubbish!’

To attend every show, unfiltered, was disorientating: the brilliant and the dire, innovative and pedestrian, celebrity-slick and grimly depressing, randomly juxtaposed. McQueen’s macabre line of beauty, Julien Macdonald’s high-glamour pageants with soap stars like Martine McCutcheon seated front row, the rebirth of Burberry with miles of check plaid, the chilly modernity of Nicole Farhi in the Banqueting House, Whitehall. And then there were the nearly-famous designers, perpetually on the brink of breakthrough, the great white hopes of British fashion: the geostrophic Turkish designer Hussein Chalayan and the Polish Arkadius, whose seminal shows ‘Le cock’ and ‘Virgin Mary wears the trousers’ I was proud to witness. London in the early 2000s was a fashion capital of shooting stars, exploding brightly in the firmament before crashing to earth in a lingering smell of sulphur.

There were designers with genuine businesses – Jasper Conran, Matthew Williamson, Caroline Charles and Pringle – and charming veterans like Paul Costelloe and Ronit Zilkha, who somehow endured from season to season.

The British fashion industry was still notionally overseen, governmentally, by the Department of Trade and Industry, though they were more comfortable engaging with the motor and steel industries than fashion. Patricia Hewitt was Secretary of State, and I visited her twice a year at the DTI’s brutalist headquarters in Victoria: my job was to make sure the grants and funding for Fashion Week didn’t stop flowing, and to persuade the DTI to subsidize the air travel and hotel bills of key American and Japanese department store fashion buyers, whose million-dollar orders were crucial to the health of British designers.

Each time I met with her, Patricia Hewitt was cloistered in a conference room with an array of spads and civil servants, none of them fashion folk. And, each time, they unveiled a new idea.

‘Nicholas, we have a concept for an innovative digital hub, which could come with matched funding. Tell us what you think … The department sets up a governmental intranet site, which can be accessed only by registered fashion designers using a special code. It could be called “Inspiration-by-Design”, that’s our working title. Then, whenever a young British designer has a stroke of genius – some great new idea – they post it on the website, and share it with all the other British designers. Say, for example, Alexander McQueen has this brilliant concept for a new trouser cut, he would put it out there, for the benefit of the whole industry. What do you reckon?’

The assembled group of advisers leant forward, pens raised, pads flourished, for my verdict.

How to explain? This is possibly the worst idea on earth, and the very last one that could possibly work. Ever. Period.

I longed to be encouraging, but I dreaded the next idea.

Patricia Hewitt asked, ‘Have your young designers considered incorporating the pashmina into their designs? Many of my friends are finding pashminas invaluable, to throw over an outfit on a chilly night.’

It was the Department of Trade and Industry which came up with the notion that Prince Andrew, Duke of York, could be a useful ambassador for British fashion, and I was instructed to introduce him to a selection of cool designers: ‘the edgier the better’ was the brief. A plan was hatched that I would take the Duke on a tour of design studios and showrooms from Chelsea to Hoxton, culminating in a boardroom lunch at Vogue House at which a dozen top fashion editors would be gathered, to explain the inner workings of the industry.

Things got off to a good start at Jasper Conran’s studio. Jasper pranced about in an oatmeal-coloured suit, showing the prototypes for a new range of orange trousers, and made various suggestions on how government might better support the industry. The Duke listened intently, amiably peremptory. He reminded me of an army general ‘taking complaints’ during an annual barrack-block inspection. He assured Jasper that all his points would be duly reported back to the powers that be.

We were driven to Hoxton in a royal Daimler with six police motorcycle outriders, holding each set of traffic lights for maximum speed. Having done the journey in fifteen minutes, rather than the customary hour, and arrived way ahead of schedule, we pulled over onto a car lot, in which inner-city kids circled the royal limo on BMXs and skateboards, or pressed their faces to the car windows.

I asked the Prince how his makeover of Royal Lodge was going, the Windsor Great Park house he had recently inherited from the Queen Mother, and which he was currently renovating.

‘There’s a devil of a lot to do,’ he said. ‘Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother hadn’t paid much attention to wiring or plumbing for some considerable time, so we’ve had to fix that. And I’m stripping out the old rose garden [location for numerous Cecil Beaton royal portraits] and replacing it with a pitch and putt golf course. And installing a bowling alley …’

We trooped into a warehouse building, used by collectives of fashion designers, including Elspeth Gibson, the object of our visit. Protection officers strode ahead and behind, on full alert for imminent ambush. The metal lift reeked of marijuana. Elspeth, the delightful Nottingham-born designer, was showing the Prince her latest collection of lace, beading and embroidery, when an alarm sounded, followed by an urgent intercom announcement. ‘There-has-been-a-major-incident-in-the-building. Do-not-repeat-do-not-leave-the-showrooms-and-lock-all-doors. Police-officers-have-been-alerted.’

We were in lockdown. The royal protection squad took up defensive positions by the door. Another officer moved closer to the Principal.

Several floors below we heard the sound of a gunshot. Eventually, a fresh posse of police stormed in, and escorted us from the premises, past yellow ‘Police Incident Scene’ tape. They seemed surprised to discover Prince Andrew in the building.

Lunch at Vogue House felt like a sanctuary. The boardroom with its walls of black and white photographs by Snowdon, Bruce Weber, Albert Watson and Patrick Demarchelier looked film-star glamorous. Already grouped around the table were the Editors and fashion editors from Vogue, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Glamour, primed to decode British Fashion.

The Duke – fired up by the Hoxton shooting episode, and by the super-chic array of female editors – was in gung-ho mood.

‘Let me ask you all a question,’ he said. ‘Because, looking around at you, I rather doubt you’ll call this one right.’ Turning to his Private Secretary, he said, ‘Write down their answers, we’ll see who comes closest …’

‘Now,’ continued the Duke, ‘if you were steering an 8,000-ton Daring-class destroyer into harbour, how far in advance of reaching port would you shut down the engine? Now, come on ladies, don’t be shy, I want you all to guess.’

The cream of British fashion editors exchanged uneasy glances. It would have been hard to assemble a less informed group on this topic.

Eventually, Alexandra Shulman, Vogue Editor, said, ‘Okay, I’ll have a guess. Five hundred yards?’

The Prince roared with laughter. ‘Way off! Who’s next? Come on, who’s next?’

Lucinda Chambers, Vogue Fashion Director, said, ‘Half a mile?’

Anna Harvey, Vogue Editorial Director of New Markets, said, ‘A thousand yards?’

Kate Reardon of Vanity Fair hazarded, ‘A mile?’

‘Not bad,’ said the Duke. ‘Anyone else, ladies?’

They all guessed. I wish I could remember the answer (it was quite high, more than a mile, I think) but time had run out, and the motorcycle outriders were circling and revving.

The great fashion briefing was timed out.

Each November, we staged the British Fashion Awards, an evening outstripped in sheer length and celebrity heft only by the Oscars. Held in vast tents in London parks, or at the Old Billingsgate Fish Market, the awards evenings comprised at least 30 categories of winners, followed by dinner for 800 to 1,000 people, with every fashion house taking a table and boasting a democratic pick ’n’ mix of celebrities from A-list Hollywood stars and supermodels to pop-up reality TV strivers.

For weeks beforehand, there would be disputes over the precise location of tables in relation to the top table, and designers saying they would only turn up if they could be guaranteed the top prize. Victoria Beckham made it a condition she would only attend if her whole family was invited along too – parents Tony and Jackie Adams, sister Louise, Louise’s partner and more. It was my role as Chairman to chat up the Beckham family at dinner, whilst celebs and demi-slebs of the Pamela Anderson, Cat Deeley, Holly Valance and Holly Willoughby variety milled about, posing for pictures on all sides.

The extended Beckham and Adams family, encountered en masse, was intriguing; their entire lives revolved around the towering fame of son-in-law David and eldest daughter Posh, and the stress that brought with it. They relished it and resented it, but would consider no solutions to better manage it.

Jackie Adams told me that, every weekend, the family assembled at Victoria and David’s country house in Hertfordshire, Rowneybury House (‘Beckingham Palace’) for lunch. But it was ruined each time by journalists from the Sunday tabloids turning up at the property and shouting questions through an intercom at the front gates. The intercom connected to the kitchen, where the Beckham family was eating. Every few minutes, a new voice would bawl, ‘Ere, Doyvid, ’ow d’ya think yer gowing to do ’gainst Arsenal next game?’ or, ‘Oy, David, Wally Skunk, Sunday People here, wots all this rumour ’bout you and this blonde bird? Anyfing in it?’

‘What can we do?’ fretted Jackie. ‘It’s so intrusive.’

‘Have you considered switching off the intercom, or moving it to another room?’

‘We can’t!’ wailed Jackie. ‘What if an invited guest turned up and wanted letting in?’

Later, she complained that their family holidays were ruined by paparazzi, constantly stalking them and giving them no peace.

I said, ‘Have you considered buying a house with a very long drive? Do what the royal family does at Balmoral and Sandringham. They don’t get much disturbance. Miles from anywhere.’

‘It’s okay for them, the royals,’ said Jackie. ‘It’s not the same thing at all. David and Victoria are globally recognized. Everyone wants a piece of them.’

Jackie told me she kept compendious cuttings books about her daughter and son-in-law, running to hundreds of volumes, and employed two girls from the village to stick everything in. They subscribed to international cuttings agencies to ensure they missed nothing. ‘Even newspaper articles from Hungary, Poland, Cyprus, you name it. They all write about Victoria and David.’

Not long afterwards, the Rebecca Loos episode broke, with an alleged affair between David Beckham and his former personal assistant in Spain. How, I wondered, did they cope with that? The Rebecca Loos cuttings would have filled a dozen volumes. Did the girls from the village have to glue them all in, in multiple languages?

The Prince of Wales attended the British Fashion Awards as guest of honour and was a big hit. He was trying to add careers in fashion for disadvantaged youths into his Prince’s Trust programme, so was in fact-finding mode. My job was to escort him down a line of designers and introduce them to him, though as we got closer to the night, the Clarence House team became more jittery by the hour. The cast of characters was a minefield: Alexander McQueen had form for anti-royal outbursts (having famously sewn the words ‘I am a cunt’ into HRH’s suit lining, while working at a Savile Row tailor), Stella McCartney was famously anti-foxhunting. (‘Can you absolutely guarantee she won’t make a scene?’ I was asked by a courtier. No, I couldn’t, not possibly.) Others might easily be drunk or coked-up.

The seating plan for dinner was virtually impossible to construct. In the event, it was sabotaged by Kate Moss and the actress Minnie Driver switching the place cards around at the last minute, so we needn’t have vacillated for so long.

The awards were the first time I had witnessed the Prince of Wales in action in the field, so to speak. He is clever at it, and well briefed (the briefs laboriously prepared to a specific template, but he studies them carefully). It is absolutely not the case that he asks, ‘Have you travelled far to be here?’ which is the royal cliché. He must have a strong short-term memory, because he retrieves nuggets of biography on cue, which can only have come from the briefings. It is flattering to people. And he lingers when he finds a conversation rewarding, and he is serious.

I’ve noticed he has developed a neat way of disengaging from a conversation group, when it is time to move on. He makes a final point, laughs, shrugs, looks regretful, allows himself to be moved on, but then, as he walks off, turns again, back towards the group he’s just left, and laughs again, sometimes pointing his finger in a jocular manner, as if to say, ‘You!’ The impression is that he is still enjoying the previous conversation, still engaged by it, and it gave him pleasure. It provides elegant closure.

It was not long afterwards that I became involved in the most complicated, stressful, unbearable and ultimately most rewarding fashion event of my life. It was entirely my own fault, there is no one else to blame. As he departed the Fashion Awards at midnight, heading for the royal train, the Prince had said, ‘Perhaps you can dream up something to raise funds for my Prince’s Trust, some kind of performance?’

Rashly, I heard myself replying, ‘I’m sure I can think of something, sir.’

The idea we came up with was Fashion Rocks, and it seemed simple enough: seventeen world-famous rock stars would perform one track each, while seventeen international fashion brands put on catwalk shows simultaneously. We would hire the Albert Hall, sell tickets and raise a million pounds for the charity. As the months rolled by, the concept grew bigger and bigger, until it involved 165 models, 10 supermodels, 72 hairdressers, 62 make-up artists, 100 dressers from 17 different designer houses, 17 rock and roll artists, 116 band members and backing singers, 1,900 backstage passes (140 of these for personal bodyguards), and TV crews for more than a hundred overseas broadcast syndicate deals. Nobody involved in this perilous, unnerving enterprise has ever fully recovered.

Like all these things, it began gently enough. I persuaded various serial philanthropists like Lily Safrafn1 and the car parks tycoon Sir Donald Goslingfn2 to put in £100,000 each to get the party started, and then we began the endless job of coaxing fashion houses to take part. We aimed high: Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada and Versace were the first eight approached, but none would commit until (a) all the others had already done so, (b) their own rock act was clearly better than the others, and (c) they had been promised the best models, preferably exclusively, so the other designers couldn’t use them too. I travelled to Paris, Milan and New York nine times, and wished I’d never had the damned idea. Meanwhile, other designers committed – Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Burberry, Donna Karan. The Americans were in if the Italians were in; the Italians looked to the French. The Brits were game, so long as it was cool.

The rock stars were worse. Robbie Williams was in, then out, then in again. Beyoncé was a breakthrough. Bryan Ferry said yes exactly when most needed, but YSL’s Tom Ford forgot to thank him, so he was nearly out again in a huff. Duran Duran were in, out, in. Sheryl Crow was a yes maybe. All night, for months, the ping of texts and the flashing red light of incoming emails ruined my sleep (I slept next to my BlackBerry). Björk was a yes for McQueen, and Grace Jones for Stella. The fight for supermodels intensified. Unless Versace got all six they’d requested, they were out. If we lost Versace, we’d lose Robbie. If we lost Robbie, we’d lose Beyoncé, who’d only agreed because he was doing it. If we lost Versace, we also risked losing Prada. Kate Moss, Karolína Kurková, Naomi Campbell, Karen Elson, Stella Tennant, Eva Herzigová, Jodie Kidd … they all wanted them. Vogue’s Charlotte Stockdale agreed to be Fashion Creative Director; her happy, glamorous, can-do face raised my spirits. Sam Gainsbury joined as Fashion Show Producer, Sally Atkins and Graham Pullen as Show Producers for Clear Channel, Malcolm Gerrie as TV Producer. It was a crack squad.

Chanel agreed to be in it. Armani threatened to pull out when they thought they’d lost Beyoncé. Dior would only be in it if they opened the show. (‘Dior cannot be anywhere except first. It is a corporate requirement of the brand.’)

The top designers had never been part of a joint show before. Never. Not once. It was impossible: so they reminded us, day after day.

Their requests grew longer and more emphatic: in the Albert Hall, their box must be closest to the Royal Box. Who was closer? How could that be, when Burberry is not in the same league as Armani? Which designer will first be introduced to the Prince of Wales? Which designer will close the show? There were raging bouts of model envy, rock star envy, dressing room envy, running order envy, billing envy.

I have perfected the knack, when things are teetering on the edge of disaster, of appearing supremely calm. It is an act, nothing more. Inside, I was dying of fear.

The only certainty was that, in less than two months’ time, the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall would be sitting there, in the Royal Box, and the lights would dim … and I wasn’t sure there’d be anything for them to see at all.

One evening I lay on my bed and declared, ‘If I could sell our house and give all the proceeds to the Prince’s Trust, and not have to go through with this show, I would.’ That was the low point.

With five weeks to go, we were five acts short, and the remaining available ones were unacceptable to the unteamed designers. ‘How could we accept your suggestion [an Alpha Minus chart topper] when Armani has Beyoncé and Dior has Joaquín Cortés, the flamenco star?’

The 6,000 tickets sold out in 36 hours. We had decided to make it black tie, which I’d had reservations about, but I was wrong because it added to the spectacle. I found it impossible to imagine the event ever happening … there were too many hurdles still to overcome; even to visualize a happy outcome might jinx it. I couldn’t sleep. It could all collapse at any moment. We now had all 17 fashion houses in place and 16 rock artists, plus a specially recorded finale video from David Bowie singing ‘Fashion’, with all 175 models parading.

Clarence House asked for briefing notes on the designers and musicians, for presentations during the intervals. We told half the designers, ‘You’re being prioritized and introduced first.’ We told the others, ‘The most important designers will meet HRH during the second interval.’ It worked.

There was a week to go. I was driven to Somerset to the Babington House hotel, where our soon-to-launch magazine Glamour was holding a sales conference. About sixty Glamour staff were staying overnight, my role was simply to thank them and make a suitably motivating speech at the end of dinner. All the way down the motorway, worrying pieces of Fashion Rocks news kept arriving. Sheryl Crow had been signed to perform during the Ralph Lauren segment, but she’d run into Tommy Hilfiger at a party in New York and now wanted to switch horses. Furthermore, she was insisting she ‘only wanted to sing for Tommy, he’s a personal friend’. Ralph Lauren went ballistic. It was World War Three. ‘If we don’t get Sheryl, we’re out,’ said the Lauren people. ‘And we’ll cancel all Ralph Lauren advertising in Condé Nast magazines … worldwide.’ (Bang goes a couple of hundred million dollars and my job.)

I went to bed with the drama still raging. At 2 a.m. there was a furious hammering on the hotel door, and cries of ‘fire, fire, evacuate’. I drew back the bedroom curtains. Outside, yards away, was an immense blaze, the hotel swimming pool and spa complex engulfed by flames. The electricity was cut, corridors plunged into darkness.

Outside on the lawn, sixty Glamour girls in nighties and dressing gowns milled about, saying, ‘OMG, I just hate you seeing me without make-up, Nicholas!’ or, ‘Would this be a good time to talk about me maybe having an assistant?’

Babington House staff circulated with coffee, while thirty fire engines roared up the drive. The heat from the blaze scalded our faces.

The only other hotel residents were an elderly French couple. He complained, ‘Somebody should ’ave told us this was going to ’appen. This fire. Nobody warned us about it. It is unprofessional.’

As the dawn light rose over the embers, a text pinged onto my phone. ‘Everything resolved. Ralph Lauren has agreed to Andrea Bocelli as their act instead. Love Claudia.’ Claudia Crow had talked them down. I don’t know how she did it. It took all night. I still owe her.

The dreaded evening of Fashion Rocks arrived. With a sense of hideous foreboding, and anxiety cramps in my stomach, I got changed into black tie and we set off to the Albert Hall. Georgia looked gorgeous in a floor-length red dress. Kensington Gore was criss-crossed with red carpets, lasers and ‘step-and-repeat’ boards emblazoned with sponsors’ logos. The first guests were already starting to arrive. Two hundred paparazzi had requested pitches in the roped VIP arrival zone. Tom Ford and Giorgio Armani were checking the proximity of their boxes to the Royal Box. John Galliano had arrived in London from Paris but promptly gone missing, having slipped his minders at St Pancras station; his PR team looked harassed.

Grace Jones was holed up at the Dorchester, allegedly refusing to perform unless given more free clothes by Stella McCartney. Bryan Ferry, surfacing from backstage, said he hadn’t seen so many beautiful women in one place in ages – 170 models were getting changed in the corridor outside his dressing room. Harvey Weinsteinfn3 loomed on the Grand Tier, ogling Karolína Kurková.

Elizabeth Hurley, who was presenting Fashion Rocks, had nineteen changes of outfit in her dressing room, one by each designer in the show, and two changes for the finale. She wore them all. She was wonderfully game throughout, and never a diva. I loved her for that; she is a Real Person, as well as a star. Circling the corridors, seeking their boxes, were the improbable foursome of Dame Joan Collins, Sir Philip Green,fn4 Richard Gere and the Swedish footballer-turned-Calvin-Klein-underwear-model Freddie Ljungberg. The Royal Box was being swept for bombs by the palace protection squad with sniffer dogs.

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall arrived – first motorbike, second motorbike, third motorbike, they’re here – and we trooped up to the box. It was one of their first public outings as a couple. Camilla was notably easy and fun. The faces of a dozen famous fashion designers peered towards the Royal Box, perhaps registering for the first time their respective proximities. Down below, in the stalls, a sea of dinner jackets and shimmering evening dresses. The National Anthem was sung, house lights dimmed. We weren’t one second late starting, unheard of at a fashion event. The Prince of Wales inserted cotton wool ear plugs from a monogrammed silver box. He removed them only once, for Andrea Bocelli, the blind tenor.

Joaquín Cortés was dazzling, ringed by parading Dior couture models. But the show took off with Beyoncé, up second, performing ‘Crazy in Love’. There is a section in that track when it goes ‘Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh’ and then ‘I look and stare so deep in your eyes / I touch on you more and more every time’ et cetera, and the chorus swells (‘So crazy right now’), when the whole audience erupted, and the Albert Hall lit up. It was a moment of pure relief, and release and joy for me, because I knew then Fashion Rocks was going to be a success, even a triumph.

The event from here on became a blur. I remember Robbie Williams performing ‘Feel’, with the supermodels Eva Herzigová, Yasmin Le Bon and Karen Elson fawning all over him. He was mesmerizing in a black Versace suit and silver trainers. ‘I scare myself to death / That’s why I keep on running / Before I’ve arrived / I can feel myself coming …’ he sang. Then added, ‘On you,’ leering at the models with a very dirty expression.

I remember Duran Duran and Bryan Adams, and then in no time it was the first interval.

The royal receptions during the intervals were the most surreal thing. Georgia escorted the Duchess of Cornwall down one line of celebrities, while I accompanied the Prince of Wales. ‘Sir, may I present Miss Grace Jones and Ms Stella McCartney?’

‘Sir, may I present Mr Domenico Dolce and Mr Stefano Gabbana and, er, the boy band Blue?’

‘Sir, may I present Miss Donatella Versace and Mr Robbie Williams?’

‘Sir, may I present Mr Alexander McQueen and Miss Björk from Iceland?’

And so on. It was magnificently incongruous.

Beyoncé was so small and frail, you worried she might snap in half. Tommy Hilfiger, who had the record number of personal bodyguards (six), was carefree. Mario Testino took pap-snaps of Naomi Campbell and Paris Vogue Editor Carine Roitfeld, so close to the royal progress it felt like photobombing.

Philip Green lumbered up, asking how much I’d paid the acts; he had a big birthday looming and fancied hiring several of them himself, he said. Jay Kay in a pale blue Burberry House check coat hobnobbed with Jade Jagger. Kelis and Sharleen Spiteri high-fived at the bar.

The McQueen segment with Björk performing ‘Bachelorette’ – her most beautiful, haunting song – her face appliquéd with thousands of Swarovski crystals, was a highlight. Bryan Ferry’s ‘Let’s Stick Together’ for YSL was another. The Daily Telegraph reported it was ‘the biggest night of fashion, rock and royalty ever seen, anywhere in the world’.

We made our £1 million on the night, and eventually £3 million when all was said and done. Fashion Rocks was over, and with it my fleeting career as an impresario.