When people ask me what i do - say, at the dentist, or for my entry to the United States – I frequently flippantly declare I look at frocks all day, and then write nasty things about them. It doesn't go down too well at U.S. Immigration, but it's a fairly accurate description of my job, in my eyes. We're coming up to London Collections: Men, but men's fashion is still dwarfed by its female counterpart. At least, in press terms. Menswear has reached the golden balance of 50 per cent of luxury good sales worldwide, but three-quarters of the fashion seasons are still womenswear - menswear has only spring/summer and autumn/winter shows, while their female counterpart doubles up with haute couture, adds resort and pre-fall, and augments the base with a further fashion week in New York for good measure.

I'm dwarfed by my female counterparts too. The fashion editors of all UK newspapers are women, likewise most international titles. There are a few male critics, such as the astute and eloquent Tim Blanks of style.com, or Mark Holgate and Hamish Bowles who critique for the American Vogue website, but by and large it's a women's world. We men are just invited along to observe.

As a boy, that's how you get drawn into fashion. Little girls get play-up dresses and Barbies, physical manipulation of cloth, but if you're a boy fixated on clothes you tend to absorb it through image. I was lucky: I hit my teens in the 90s, when Vivienne Westwood was at the height of her historically-inspired excess, when John Galliano and Alexander McQueen were appointed heads of Dior and Givenchy, and when fashion was fantastical, awe-inspiring and, by and large, entirely unwearable. It was fashion as a spectator sport - for him, and for her. And for me. Fashion was my teenage equivalent of football, Galliano the team I fervently supported through thick and thin.

Now I'm an active participant. And there are undoubtedly issues with being a bloke in a profoundly feminine sphere. Certain arenas are resolutely closed: let's not pretend there will ever be a male editor of a Vogue title, nor Elle. And it's understandable: rather than democratic woman-to-woman suggestion (I wear this, you try it too!), a man at the helm of a female magazine has shades of Svengali or Pygmalion. Namely, a man dictating to women, transforming them. Moulding them in their image. I get it.

"A man at the helm of a female magazine has shades of Svengali or Pygmalion. A man dictating to women, transforming them. I get it."

I sometimes wonder if men have less empathy? I remember a Viktor & Rolf show where each model teetered on towering wooden clogs supporting her own vast lighting rig. Female fashion journalists focused on the obvious discomfort in wearing (or even bearing) those clothes. Male fashion journalists, on the whole, thought it made one hell of a show.

The flip side is true. I often hear women extoll the virtues of how much they would love to wear something, or how wonderful it would feel. Usually, it's in relation to a giant sweater the colour and texture of masticated oatmeal, or a fluffy lace dress I'd dismiss as brainless. I have that issue with entire collections: every woman I know loved the glittery pink boots at Saint Laurent, a show I loathed passionately. Perhaps it's the ability to shop at a show, to see the reality behind garments that I am automatically removed from? It's understandably tricky to loathe something you'd actually quite like to wear, although it's quite easy to like something you could never wear in a million years.

The idea of objectivity, though, isn't tied up in gender. Suzy Menkes once said to me "I think you can actually dislike something very much and almost feel it's quite abhorrent, but still think it's brilliant." In other words, don't let your personal taste influence your professional opinion. An art critic would never let the dimensions of their lounge-diner walls influence their view of a masterpiece. Why should fashion be any different? As a counterpart to my statement above, even if you can't hate something you want to own, the urge to acquire doesn't make it ground-breaking, or even interesting. I'd quite like to buy a few new pieces from COS. Doesn't mean they're worthy of critical consideration.

Desirability can be dire, and ugly, and in the right hands it can be great. That's sort of the point of Miuccia Prada, after all. Incidentally, I wear plenty of Prada womenswear. I haven't crossed into cross-dressing completely (skirts are my final frontier), but it makes no difference to me if a jacket buttons left to right or vice versa, if I like it enough.

"An art critic would never let the dimensions of their lounge-diner walls influence their view of a masterpiece"

A few female journalists have commented to me that they don't cover menswear (or - worse - have no interest in it) because they can't relate to it. Bollocks. I relate no better to the waifish, six-foot something boys dressed in skinny tailoring at Prada than I do to the whippet-thin women laced into the corsets and crinolines of haute couture. It's not about what can end up on my back - although I'd like to think my back is braver than most. And narrower than most men, so if needs must I could fit into one of those corsets at a push. Although possibly only with the aid of half a packet of Lurpak and a shoe-horn.

The perception of menswear is that it's less polarising, less opinionated - and frankly, less interesting - than womenswear. Once a friend of mine asked me, out and out, at the start of a winter menswear season: "Isn't it difficult writing about boring suits all day?" Sometimes, it is. But it's easier to excite through menswear, I think. Because our demands are lower, and it's simpler to shock. Sometimes that leads to the banal. Put a bloke in a skirt and you're guaranteed front-pages, but is it actually taking us anywhere new?

That is, ultimately, what I'm looking for in clothes - regardless of the gender of the models inside them, and certainly regardless of the eyes observing.