In the last few years, at show after show, I've confronted catwalks packed with ensembles outré enough to make a man's veins run suddenly cold . Beautiful (albeit sillily thin and inappropriately young) women dressed in a manner guaranteed to wither the male gaze far more efficiently than a nun's habit. This withering is not because they look covered up and chastely tasteful . It's because the outfits they're wearing make them look like freshly escaped loonies. A few burned-into-the-retina regrets from the Autumn 2012 collections include camel-toe-flashing body stockings in jester's diamonds, ruffled tulle pink buttock-skimmers wider than anything in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and post-apocalyptic cult robes with frayed yarn face masks and death's-head make-up… the 21st-century womenswear catwalk is all too often no place for men who relish a little black dress .Take the peplum. This inexplicable hip extension is fashion's current equivalent to the appendix: entirely useless yet utterly ubiquitous. Or the current ankle sock with high-heel trend: why subvert a sexy shoe with saggy, granny ankles? And what's going on with the stupid, sadly not-quite-yet-over neon movement? Surely only paramedics and binmen could wish to dress in that saccharinely virulent shade of orange . Over the past few years I have silently asked myself scores of similar questions, adrift in a fragrant sea of rapturously applauding female fashion editors. The discovery of a blog entitled The Man Repeller helped me start to square womenswear's circle of aggressively ugly . Written by a young New Yorker named Leandra Medine, it amusingly recounted her flirtation with fashion fripperies that she not only knows but delights in knowing will send most men running to the hills . And then the comment of a female colleague after one particularly to-the-male-eye unattractive show - "you'll never understand that! It was brilliant!" - cemented the thought: perhaps some fashion appeals to women precisely because of its burka-trumping capacity to confound masculine attention. Fashion has become an arena in which conventional male tastes, whether we like it or not, are an irrelevance. Sometimes, a designer's freedom to whip up whatever they want - the loopier the better - can produce brilliant results. Mary Katrantzou's pencil skirt made of pencils and her red Olivetti dress are great recent examples . Too often, however, contemporary fashion is an impenetrable in-joke as inexplicable as the worst type of contemporary art. http://www.getnewbalance.com