There’s just no tale to be told in: “This cost me £400 from Liberty’s.”. When he arrived his girlfriend’s mother gawped at him in horror – for he was wearing her old blouse. The artist and writer Harland Miller told me that he once stopped off at a village jumble sale en route to a girlfriend’s twenty-first. There he found a glorious silk shirt festooned with printed cameos of an Edwardian lady, which he teamed with his jacket and trews.

Time was you could nip into any church hall on a Saturday and emerge 40 minutes later with six Tesco bags stuffed full of nylon slips, old Jaegar shirts and cheese-cloth sundresses, and still have change from a fiver. Even my wedding dress was from the Red Cross shop in Cambridge.But these successes are as nothing to the triumphs of the jumble sale – as was. For the halcyon days of the Scout-hut bargain are also long gone. Few things register higher on the smug-ometer than someone admiring a satin halter-neck frock that cost £15 from an Ely junk stall, or the whalebone swimming costume pulled from a skip near Sizewell nuclear power station. For years my favourite frock was a fitted black lace number from Oxfam that set me back two quid. They look gorgeous in the dead maestro’s nymph-tastic designs (over £500 a pop, to the likes of you and me) and you know that until the party invite popped through the door the only Ozzie they had heard of was the one with Tourette’s syndrome on MTV.In my book it’s against the rules to pay a fortune for dead people’s cast-offs: the thrill is in unearthing a bargain.

I am feeling particularly bitter after looking at the snaps of society gals attending the opening night party of the V&A’s Ozzie Clark exhibition. (When did Nineties’ kecks from Hennes earn the soubriquet “vintage”?) The net result is that a wand-like girl in a ravishing Forties’ tea-gown is no longer a bold adventuress through the land of mothballs, fleas and urine, but a rich bitch on the Atkins diet who phoned the stockist’s number in Vogue. Now Liberty’s supplier will have got there first, or the charity shop will have such items in a “vintage section” at uncharitable prices. Once upon a time you could slip into the local Help the Aged and emerge triumphant with a Lurex frock and astrakhan coat, smelling faintly of incontinent cat, for under a tenner. While the average Ghost dress might set you back £250, vintage frocks can cost up to £800 (though they are in mint condition). Whistles, Jigsaw and Top Shop have also all flirted with second-hand glam, and I’m beginning to wonder whether the rag-trade will soon dispense with manufacturing altogether and just do door-to-door collections for your old kit, so that they can flog it back to you a couple of years later at an inflated price.The creeping, big boy takeover of the hand-me-down clothes market has taken all the thrills out of thrift shopping. Ghost is another offender: at its Marylebone branch Thirties’ wedding dresses and Edwardian lace blouses are dotted amongst the label’s own wares.

It is a tacit admission of the exhausted imagination evident in so much contemporary design. These hybrids look like the outfits teenagers fashion from their mums’ cast-offs and old net curtains and are priced around the £250 mark. I wanted to direct customers to Annie’s Antique Clothes and Cloud Cuckoo Land in north London, where you can pick up gorgeous old gowns for £50.
There’s no greater admission of defeat than for a fashion outlet to start flogging old frocks at three times the price of in-house garments. But by far the biggest rip-off are the two modern, shapeless black jersey vests with manky white linen and lace collars tacked on to them. A synthetic, black lace, negligee-style dress, is a mere £370, a nothing special kimono is £419. They are certainly far superior to the racks of bog-standard vintage clothes for sale on the first floor – at cardiac arrest prices. I’m not speaking to clothes.” But what really maddened me was Liberty’s filling its windows with dresses no customer can buy, which also happen to be lovelier than most of the contemporary garments on the racks.