As a transvestite, by definition I have an unhealthy obsession with women’s clothes. For me they are more than protection from the weather, more than a status symbol, more than a membership card of the cognoscenti — they are a carrier of my most private signals, they are the heraldry of my subconscious.

Fashion on the other hand brings up mixed feelings for me. I love the exuberant creativity, the luxury, the unapologetic indulgence in beauty and sensuality. The flipside of fashion’s virtues I find less endearing: its pretensions, its wastefulness, its unethical manufacturing practices, its often blind loyalty to studied cool.

Fashion is one of the largest industries in the world, employing millions from the lock-in sweatshops of Asia to the “by appointment only” fashion houses of Paris. At its best fashion exudes a joie de vivre and dedication to innovation and craftsmanship that would shame the art world; at its worst it is a cynical mechanism to sell shoddy novelties.

My defining fashion experience happened in Paris at the autumn/winter haute couture shows in 2005. I had been asked to cover the shows for a now defunct magazine and had leapt at the opportunity to wear frocks all week and witness the spectacle. For a few brief moments I felt more glamorous than I thought possible. I had been whisked to a front-row seat at the Chanel show and given myself up to the orgasm of choreographed superelegance.

Back in our car my chic high was cut short when the driver said that there had been some bombs in London. I spent the next three hours desperately trying to contact my family. The banal terror brought the sparkle of the sequins into jagged focus. Suddenly haute couture, the apotheosis of a world dedicated to the nuance of cut and colour, seemed ridiculous. And yet the shows stood as a riotous carnival of sex and art in the face of the killjoy Islamic terrorists. It is ironic then that much of haute couture is kept afloat by the wives of Saudi sheikhs.

If pressed, I would say that my favourite hobby is dress-designing. I love nothing better than to doodle ideas for future outfits. I am an enthusiastic amateur. So I was incredibly flattered when Cally Blackman contacted me and asked if she could include some of my drawings from Paris 2005 in her book 100 Years of Fashion Illustration , which is published this week and is accompanied by a show at William Ling in Golborne Road, West London. As an artist I am in good company, with the likes of Sonia Delaunay, Alexander Rodchenko, Raoul Dufy and of course Andy Warhol, who was a very successful fashion illustrator before he embodied Pop Art.

The book takes us on an evocative journey from the stiffly corseted and collared Edwardians, through the Deco 1920s and Dior’s New Look to the Adobe Photoshop work of Graham Rounthwaite and Jason Brooks so redolent of club flyers and advertising at the turn of the millennium. The best illustrators, such as Antonio Lopez, René Gruau and Caroline Smith, are not only first-class draughtsmen but capture and distil the spirit of the clothes in a way that a photograph cannot.

Like many who keep half an eye on the kaleidoscope of fashion, I tend to have stock characteristics that I associate with each of the fashion capitals. Paris is the height of sophisticated elegance, Milan is sex, London is eccentrically avant-garde, Tokyo is cerebral and New York is, well . . . beige. New York fashion designers have long been famous for sportswear, and by this I don’t mean trainers and a tracksuit, I mean the informal elegance of comfortable yet dressy separates. This is the look perfected by designers such as Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Donna Karen who specialised in practical luxury. To me it always looked too safe, but things have changed.

New York Fashion Now , which opens next week at the V&A, is a display of the latest generation of designers, some of whom are a million miles from preppy cashmere conservatism. New York has long had a thriving coolness industry, and this show, curated by the excellently named Sonnet Stanfill, will reflect what is hip and home-grown on the island of the elegantly wasted.

Most of the young designers featured started up in this most precarious business at about the time of 9/11 and perhaps because of the timing have found a lot of support from the city’s press and institutions. The show includes designers who continue the New York tradition of making the desirable very wearable. Zak Posen, Proenza Schouler and Behnaz Sarafpour all make lovely pieces that I would happily wear to lunch at Harvey Nicks.

Others though are working in ways that we might in the past have associated with London or Paris. Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Miguel Adrover and Three as Four produce concept-heavy fashion with enough ideas and frayed edges to be worthy of any student at St Martins. Jean Yu, Maggie Norris and Costello Tagliapietra are making high-quality handmade clothes in the custom of a French atelier, using skilled craftsmen and with a lot of personal input from the client. This show is a view of New York fashion reacting to globalisation. Designers no longer have to specialise in cruisewear for East Coast socialites.

Fashion champions qualities that I feel are often sorely lacking in the fine-art world at present, an unabashed indulgence in sensual beauty and, at the top end, exquisite craftsmanship. Fashion shows can be an undignified scrum to get into, followed by an interminable wait, but when the music starts and a million euros worth of loveliness and talent and skill clomp down the runway I am a sucker and I cry.

–– 100 Years of Fashion Illustration by Cally Blackman is published by Laurence King. New York Fashion Now is at the V&A, SW7 (020-7942 2000), from Tuesday

Bremner’s Brecht: the Knowledge podcast

In this week’s Knowledge podcast, available from 6pm today at timesonline. co.uk/podcasts, Rory Bremner talks about his new translation of Brecht at the Young Vic and we take a look at the late-night comedy sensation Maxwell’s Full Mooners. We’ll be playing tracks from the new Bright Eyes album and reviewing The Lives of Others, a new film about the East German Stasi.

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