I have witnessed some embarrassing fashion moments in my time. Naomi Campbell falling off her Vivienne Westwood platforms. An overweight style editor arranging herself on one of those gilt chairs you get at fashion shows, and demolishing it entirely, ending up with her enormous gusset on show to the crème of Parisian high society… yes, I am well versed in the pit- and prat-falls of fashion.

So it was a surprise to me when I spent last Tuesday afternoon trapped in a dress at Whistles. Hideous, it was. The experience, I mean, not the dress. The dress itself was a delicate little puff of a number, in pastel-print chiffon with adorable shoestring straps. Its defining feature, though, was that it was too small for me. Heaven knows what I was thinking. I had been egged-on by a typically titchy sales girl – the kind of woman who would have been a jockey if she’d been born a man. She had that Kylie-petite thing going on, groomed in the carelessly perfect way that shop assistants do so well – all giggly curls and plucked eyebrows. Anyway, there she was, saying, “Go on, I’m sure the 12 is too big – have a try of the 10!”

Before I knew it I was inside the 10. And unable to get out. I tried everything: shimmying it up and over my head, nudging it down past my waist, squidging it into a roll of fabric which encircled my waist like a rubber ring, sucking in my breath and attempting to shift the ruddy thing using the pure power of thought. No good. The more I tried, the hotter I got, which acted a bit like Pritt. I wasn’t sticky and slippery. I was sticky and sticky. Beneath the dress, I was naked but for a pair of jokey knickers – a thong emblazoned with the immortal words “Forget love, I’d rather fall in chocolate”. It was seven whole minutes before I summoned the nerve to ask for help from Kylie, who was outside folding ponchos and humming The Ketchup Song.

“I, err, um, appear, ha-ha, to be trapped in your dress,” I said, keeping my voice bubbly and amused, as if I’d just heard a witty riposte at a drinks party. My message was muffled by the fitting-room curtain and by the dress itself, which had lodged itself somewhere over my shoulders, thus, in a cruel twist of fate and fabric, obscuring my mouth but revealing my lower body, complete with hilarious G-string and neglected bikini-line. I was a human skittle. I wished for death.

“No worries, I’ll help,” sang Kylie. She bowled into the cubicle-cum-coffin and slapped back the curtain like a matron in a Carry On film. “We’ll soon have you out of there!” We, it transpired, included a bloke and his girlfriend over by the cash register, who shot out helpful tips (“don’t breathe too much”), and the woman who ran the sandwich shop opposite (oh the shame). Kylie, meanwhile, had one foot on my left hip and was heaving and ho’ing at the dress, as if pulling a giant turnip. My naked rump, you’ll be delighted to hear, was squashed up against the mirrored wall of the fitting room.

Sixteen minutes. That was my sentence inside that dress. It eventually popped off like the lid of a Pringles tube. I bought it, of course, in a fit of embarrassment. The moral of this story? Always wear proper pants.

Published You Magazine, November 14 2005