I WASN’T aware that there was something called virtual fashion until I met a young man last week who is doing a thesis about it. It’s kind of the emperor’s new clothes for the digital age. It is, of course, primarily for the rich and famous and gullible, like the Picasso in the vault, but not making the clothes is justified because it solves the industry’s biggest problem, mass production and excessive waste – at least that’s what the buyers and sellers claim.

If you have about $10,000 to spare – that’s what someone paid recently – you send a picture of yourself to the fashion house, which probably exists somewhere, and they design a completely exclusive dress for you and you get the result in 3D.

Through blockchain technology (I don’t understand that either) the dress is yours and cannot be reproduced or copied – and you’re the only one who can post it on social media. So you still get all the likes and the envious approvals but it saves you going out of the house to those tedious first nights and cocktail parties.

The founder of The Fabricant, which sold the virtual dress – a diaphanous affair which looks a bit like a cycle cape to me – at a charity auction, is Kerry Murphy. Here’s how he sees it: “Our work exists beyond the current concepts of catwalks, photographers, studios, and sample sizes.

“For The Fabricant, imagination is our only atelier, and our fashion stories are free from the constraints of the material world.” And it turns a buck too.

A Scandinavian outfit called Carlings, at the lower end of the price range, released a 19-piece digital clothing collection, with a limited run of 12 of each item, costing up to £25 each, which it promoted through paid influencers on Instagram. Its designers manipulated the images so the punters appeared to be wearing the clothes. The collection sold out in a week.

More and more of the traditional fashion houses are getting into this, apparently. And investors. You buy your exclusive from a top designer and five or 10 years from now the value could have soared, so you sell it on through the blockchain – a second-hand dress that doesn’t exist and can’t have been worn to someone who has it 3D-remodelled to fit them.

It’s entirely mad, the ultimate in consumerism even if you don’t actually consume it. It will certainly cut costs in the fashion industry with virtual catwalks and deepfake models, no real overheads, no costly materials to buy, no ethical problems about where they are sourced from with a feelgood bonus of not adding once-worns to landfill.

Stop this digital world, I want to get off.

The other Cromwell

I HAVEN’T read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy but I gather that Thomas Cromwell, Henry the VIII’s chief minister, is the hero, or villain, or both. He shared the same traits as his contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli although I’m not sure the two were aware of each other.

Cromwell commissioned, on Henry’s orders after his split from the Catholic Church, the Great Bible, the first authorised bible in English.

Two luxurious vellum copies were produced in Paris which would be the models from which the copies for churches would be mass-produced.

One of these is held at St John’s College in Cambridge and, using a range of non-invasive techniques, from spectroscopy to digital microscopy, historian Eyal Poleg and scientist Paola Ricciardi discovered what you might call Tudor Photoshopping.

They proved that Cromwell’s face

had been skilfully cut in to have him receiving a bible from the king’s left hand whereas in the original he was

a level below and down the pecking order.

It’s an amazing discovery by the pair who believe that the Cromwell image was almost certainly painted in England, with Cromwell modelling, and that it could only have been done by one of two court painters, Lucas Horenbout or Hans Holbein. Their research findings will be published later but they have written about it in the current edition of online publication The Conversation.

Their work has been given the thumbs-up by Mantel who commented that it “suggests that the politicians of the 16th century were as capable of manipulation of images as those of the present day”.

A year after the Great Bible was published in 1539, Cromwell was condemned to death without trial for treason, lost all his properties and titles, and was beheaded on Tower Hill on the same day Henry married Catherine Howard, his fifth wife. She wasn’t to last either. A year later she, too, was beheaded, aged 19.

Another fine mess

England has followed Scotland in making an utter bourach of its A-level exam system, with 40% of students downgraded, the majority of them from poorer areas. I wonder how many of us would be where we are today if this unfair, algorithm-imposed sanction had been applied when we sat them, or Highers? How many doctors, surgeons, scientists and highly-skilled and crucial workers wouldn’t be in those jobs now?

And why are the universities, who have invited students for interviews based on their predicted grades, blowing them out over an exam they didn’t take? Surely the students whose grades have been lowered have a legal case that their future has been arbitrarily blighted because the computer said no?

I hope there will be a mass protest, as there was here. And if Marcus Rashford joins the campaign it will surely be reversed.