AT the end of his Spring-Summer '93 show, hip young American designer Christian Francis Roth appeared in a pull-on hat made of old socks. ''I'm sick of fashion,'' he told the crowd.
Soon after, a famous New York magazine art director was tossed out of the bar at the Ritz Hotel in Paris by a doorman who hadn't heard of grunge and took him for a tramp.
Now perfectly respectable fashion writers such as Carrie Donovan of The New York Times are promoting that most prosaic of garments, the white shirt - correction, the Big White Shirt - as a must-have.
Add the new season's revival of the 60s and 70s and what do you have? Emanuel Ungaro, who has never done a tacky or blatantly derivative collection in his life summed it up best: ''When fashion repeats itself, it stutters.'' To many, the latest ''trends'' are also a shallow parody made all the worse by the fact that most of the people pushing them are old enough to remember what inspired them in the first place.
The Bomb, the Vietnam War, the women's movement, the Pill, the Beatles and their magical mystery tour - to the generation which grew up during that consciousness-raising era, what's happening in fashion now is an out-and-out sham.
It's also a complete mess. To the love-ins of the 60s, designers have piled on the most vulgar excesses of the 70s, with the result that women are being bombarded with a truly horrible hodge-podge.