It takes a strange type of person to look at the reporting from Pakistan, as that country stumbles into further bloodshed and crisis, and come up with idle comments about Benazir Bhutto's clothes.
Luckily I am that strange type of person. I say it's time Benazir dumped the white head scarf, the veil that flattens her hair and makes her look fat. I may not be well qualified to make these remarks, or even well dressed, but I have my opinions. Women always have opinions about other women's clothes.
In Britain, a respected fashion journalist called Sarah Mower is living under what could turn out to be a fashion fatwa after rather casually saying that she didn't think women over 40 should wear leather jackets. That women over 40 - and Mower included Kate Moss in this, even though Kate Moss is only 33 - should run such dubious items as leather jackets past what Mower called their "mutton monitor".
Boy, is Sarah Mower brave.
Irate readers have been contacting Mower at her newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, to let her know that, as one woman told her: "I am 56 and do not intend to disappear." Another woman wrote to upbraid her, saying: "Mutton dressed as lamb, indeed! That women have adopted this expression to police our own appearance is offensive."
And yet, and yet.
As the teenagers of this country plunge themselves into cocktail wear, pearls and extra-cover foundation whilst they're still at school, their mums are in puff-sleeved smock tops and hipster jeans. You have to say that it is a bit peculiar.
Despite the outcry, Sarah Mower is bloody but unbowed. She has proscribed the above-the-knee dress for anyone over 40 who was stupid enough to buy one (oops). Mower says: "I don't care how skinny you are, or how toned your body: when the face-age doesn't match the dress-age you look silly." Lord, she's strict.
I like, but do not wear, the busy mum's uniform of a leather jacket and denim jeans. After all, this is the outfit that got an entire generation through its youth. It has survived because it is a good, practical set of clothing which will take you (fashion people always say that clothes take you places, as if they drove you there in a car) from dropping the kids off, to going in to your own office and then belting round the supermarket on the way home. It also acquits itself quite well, if memory serves, when its wearer is being carted in and out of vans by police officers who were usually much gentler than the police officers the Pakistani women are facing.
The leather jacket really came into its own during the European riots of the 1960s. I'd like to see Sarah Mower try to tell a French or Italian woman over 40, 50 or 60 that she shouldn't wear it any more. However, the raw truth of the matter is that the leather jacket is a boy's garment and most women over 40 are not shaped like boys - or girls either. This is where the women of Pakistan have it over us, big time.
The shallow among us cannot help noting that Benazir Bhutto's clothes - including that horrible white veil, which really has to go - make her look like an icon from medieval times, traditional and immensely serious. Her whole silhouette looks ready to be struck on to a medal. She is from a culture where women's clothing is even more significant than it is in our own, signalling an entire world view and, for the Islamist extremists, a rejection of modernity.
This is the constituency, presumably, that Benazir Bhutto's clothes are intended to reassure.
At the same time, we cannot help noting either that in many of the protests televised since last weekend, middle-aged women figure rather prominently, and actively. Their sensuous but modest clothing seems to hold up pretty well even as they are carted in and out of police vans or attacked by female opponents.
Truly stylish people don't wear fashion, but a uniform that suits them. Unfortunately, western culture is very limited in the uniforms it offers to middle-aged and old women. The clothes have never caught up with the changes in our lives. There's your executive suit, your elastic-waisted skirt and also your leather jacket and jeans. Whether you are a stay-at-home mother, a carer, or an office worker (or a combination of all of the above) - experimentation with different types of clothing is both time-consuming and expensive. No wonder that women working in the home live in tracksuits, and that women working in offices live in head-to-toe black, the wage-earners' burka.
There is very little room for manoeuvre between the stiletto and the K shoe, and shopping gets harder and harder. The rise of the over-elaborate, impossibly silly designer handbag is no mystery really - it's the only item that will fit everyone.
So Sarah Mower should be careful before she snatches the leather jacket from our, cold dead hands. At the very least she should offer us a couple of realistic alternatives to it.