Countess Louise J. Esterhazy, the nom de plume of the publisher of trade mag Women's Wear Daily John Fairchild, has today accused us - all of us: the fashion industry, consumers, latterday life-livers - of being overstuffed.

'We’re so stuffed with clothes, with food, with technology, with stuff that we’re like a pumped-up helium balloon about to burst (of course, some have said I’ve always looked like that). We’re missing the simple joys of life,' she writes in a column this morning.

I'm so used to people telling us we have too much and we spend too much and we do too much that I'm inclined to agree. Except, wait - actually, I'm not.

Not since the Nineties has fashion enjoyed such a spread of stealth wealth, an unspoken decision that too much is more than enough and a general endeavour to simply look well put together, rather than cast in gold. Yes, the wealth part still cloys, but the stealth bit is laudable - and tasteful. The opposite in fact of what Fairchild's columnist persona is getting at.

Céline handbags and sumptuous Jil Sander double-faced wool coats; label-less, insignia-free and anoynmous but for lashings of luxury that one can sense a mile off and feel immediately in one green-eyed lapel tibble.  On the high street there's COS and Unqilo; by common consensus the 'It-bag' is dead, as we turn to reliable classics over striking one-season statements.

So, to quote the Countess, we aren't 'over-stuffed'. The circus of egos come show-time, at couture in July and the collections in September, may suggest otherwise. But the customers are doing something else entirely - and they're doing it very quietly.