I read somewhere that the mirrors in some shop changing rooms are designed to make us look slimmer.  It may be an urban myth, but it’s a smart plan anyway.  Clearly, if the answer to the question, ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ is ‘yes’, or if, in my case, if I miraculously look a bit taller, we’re more likely to buy.

It’s a mean and dishonest idea but it’s easy to see its commercial potential.  Looking in the mirror can be a dispiriting experience, especially as we get older and change shape, sagging, wrinkling and balding while the rest of the world gets thinner, more sculpted and elegant.  A mirror that makes us look better is very appealing.

Weirdly, though, ideals of beauty have been so many and varied over time that the chances are, rather encouragingly, are that most of us conform to one or other of them. We didn’t all always want to be thin. In the 50s and 60s it was common to see adverts for products promising to help you (and I quote), ‘put on extra inches and pounds of firm, healthy flesh’, and warning sternly that, ‘If you want to be popular – you can’t afford to be skinny!’

Looking on the walls of art galleries, we see that in fifteenth-century Florence, the pale, long-necked woman with the impossibly complicated hairdo was the one to be seen with.  In seventeenth century Belgium, she was round and plump and pink.  In Regency England, fashionable men wore thick makeup, beauty spots and a wig, whereas ancient Romans chose to be portrayed with all the lines and signs of age, so that people would see in their face the marks of a virtuous life of dutiful service.

The Roman idea that experience should be worn as a badge of pride, and that inner, not outer beauty was what counted was echoed by Jesus’ friend Peter, who wrote that ‘beauty should not come from outward adornment…rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit’.

I’ll think of that the next time I look in the mirror to see a bald, crumpled gnome in an old sweater looking back at me.

This was written for London Fashion Week.