Not nearly enough has been said about the massive subcultural phenomenon that has grown out of the photographic narcissism of girls.

Put it this way: the most fought-over toy in our house is my digital camera, which is put to heavy use practically every evening and weekend, taking hundreds of shots of my 15-year-old daughter and her friends pouting in various locations around London.

The pictures are then swapped by email, recoloured, captioned, put on Facebook and I don’t know what.

I can’t find it in me to work up much disapproval. Let’s be honest: what is more entrancing than looking at photographs of yourself, especially if you have taken them, as you see yourself, at your best, with all the uglies safely deleted?

Which is why it’s a stroke of genius that Topshop has just installed a self-photography studio at its London flagship store. Even better, this Photo Machine, which allows you to check your pose in a 6ft mirror before you press the button, is the original 1970s invention of Helmut Newton except now the camera is digital and you walk away with an instant printout.
At opening time yesterday, it was mobbed by young girls queueing to try it out and one old one.

Here’s my picture of me by me (above left), taken yesterday morning, in a Saint Laurent top a touch, I fancied, in honour of Newton’s long career interpreting YSL’s style for the world.

Newton’s ex-assistant, Philippe Serieys, was there to give tips before withdrawing behind a screen to leave me in private. “What you have to do is just relax,” he said.

“Don’t concentrate on your face. Look at the shape your body’s making, and move.”

It was fun, huge fun especially as it closed a bit of a circle for me, because I interviewed Newton at home in Monte Carlo in the summer of 2003, a year before he died. He was a splendid old roué, searingly honest and politically incorrect in a way that would have made me foam at the mouth at 20 and had me laughing at twice that age. He took me to lunch at the beach club and admired my spike heels. My big regret is that I never asked for a snap.

To have been photographed by Helmut Newton, that would be something. This, though, makes a nice second best. Access to the Helmut Newton Photo Machine is free at Topshop Oxford Circus until June 15 and at the Arndale branch, Manchester, and Stephen’s Green, Dublin,
As we speak, Graduate Fashion Week is showcasing penniless fledgling student designers at Earls Court, while at the loaded end of the spectrum, fine jewellery makers are celebrating the first Coutts London Jewellery Week.

Tonight, Swarovski kicks events up to high gear with its Runway Rocks show, for which fashion designers such as Christopher Kane and Marios Schwab, and specialist jewellery designers including Shaun Lean, have contributed pieces.

Lean, who executes commissions for Alexander McQueen, as well as running his own business, says he is about to unveil one of his best pieces yet.

“It’s a headpiece based on cherry blossom,” he says. “I’ve cast real cherry twigs in silver, made 150 rose-coloured Swarovski flowers and put song-birds in the branches. The model sort of looks like a stag coming down the runway.”

CLUTCH BAGS: THEY MAY BE SMALL, BUT THEY'RE THE NEXT BIG THING

Call me the Cassandra of the catwalks, but the era of the It bag - which opened precisely a decade ago with the invention of that armpit-snuggling pet, the Fendi Baguette - is over.

In an exact mirroring of the economy, the design of bags reached such a baroque state of super-sized, bling-jingling insanity last year that something had to crash.

All right, the bubble hasn't exactly exploded, but the hiss of escaping air is practically audible. Meanwhile, visual evidence of this severe bout of downsizing is with us: the next big thing in bags is a small thing. It's a clutch.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when a discreet clutch bag began to seem right; rather than a gargantuan monster dangled from the elbow in a display of faux-nonchalance, à la Mrs Beckham. It has certainly had a lot to do with the reappearance of blazers for daytime: shoulder bags, particularly the current hardware-heavy ones, ruin the silhouette of a jacket. What you want is something that can be clamped under the arm.

Tellingly, when Fendi came to rethink the Baguette for its 10th anniversary, it appeared on the catwalk soft, squashy and (crucially) shorn of its strap. This bag travels by hand.

Same for evening. Anything that nips into the shoulder and rudely interferes with the line of a dress should be fired and replaced with a pochette that tucks neatly into the palm.

But there is no such thing as a shift in fashion without social ramifications - and a large dose of the ridiculous. It's no coincidence that the first handbags - evolved in Regency times as a way of dispensing with pockets, so as not to interrupt the new the Empire line - made men laugh so hard they named them "reticules".

The 2008 upshot, I've noticed, is a fresh form of dinner party behaviour in which women nonchalantly place their glittery, feathery, lacy, furry, shiny clutch bags next to their plates, thus triggering bouts of competitive female cooing around the table.

That ridiculousness pales to naught, though, when compared to the demands of accommodating a clutch for day. Paring portable possessions down to almost nothing doesn't come easy to a member of the packhorse generation like me. I am a woman, and mother, who will go about her business with a bag that, apart from functioning as a first aid field station, is also a telecommunication command-cum-makeover centre containing laptop, mobile, chargers, hairbrushes, cosmetics bag, umbrella and a change of shoes.

Still, whenever did fashion bow to practicality? Whatever comes up, no matter how antithetical to "lifestyle" or common-sense, women will find a way to deal with it. I've been racking my brains and have hit on a compromise - a clutch that goes inside a matching shopper by the Italian-based designer Michael Teperson.

The giganto-bag, without which I actually can't function psychologically, now gets stashed under desks or held in cloakrooms, while I sail off with the mini-version to do business, feeling streamlined, sorted and utterly in control. Illusion, of course, but hey, isn't that what fashion's for in the first place?