Wherever and whatever that strange site of creativity is that feeds the great fashion designers, that makes them understand what is to come before anybody else and makes them immediately try to transform their unease into something approaching beauty, is a fascinating question. And it's not just a question for frivolous fashion types who "don't live in the real world" because we all actually do. Eric Hobsbawm, the late Marxist historian, said in The Age of Extremes: "Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously nonanalytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, remains one of the most obscure questions in history and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."