The announcement that Bruce Oldfield has redesigned the staff uniforms at McDonald's seems to me the most futile exercise in turd-polishing since Adolf Hitler looked in the mirror and thought to himself: “Hmm, maybe I'd look better with a little moustache.”

Ever since the world woke up to the obesity, heart disease, cancer, impotence and misery that a fast-food diet inevitably leads to, McDonald's has done everything in its power to deflect attention away from its hamburgers and on to other things.

They tried putting salads on the menu. But the salads turned out, it was said, to have more calories in them than the Big Macs. They tried a general overhaul of outlets in posher areas, dropping the red and yellow and going over to muted charcoal and pastels, hoping to encourage attractive young professionals to “hang out” there, as if it were the Central Perk Café in Friends (“The one in which Rachel balloons to 18 stone and Ross suffers a massive coronary”). But it didn't work.

And now this. They're still going to be selling the products that lie at the heart of Britain and America's very serious obesity crisis, not to mention the litter crisis, the deforestation crisis, the animal welfare crisis and the nasty smell up and down your high street crisis; but they're going to be doing it in black-and-white semi-fitted shirts and fluted skirts. So that's OK, then.

Bruce Oldfield himself even admits that “it was a big challenge to come up with something that would work for a huge range of sizes and shapes”. Yup, that's Mickey D's for you: a huge range of sizes and shapes. Except that we're people, not flat-pack furniture. We're not meant to come in a huge range of sizes and shapes. We're meant to be the size and shape of people. Seems to me the solution to a 23-stone woman shaped like a potato is to get her out of McDonald's and on to a healthy diet. Not just create a giant, potato-shaped dress.

It's not as if the man who designed so many of Princess Diana's favourite dresses hasn't already done his bit to highlight the problems of a poor diet. Indeed, it looks like a pretty bold move from the inventors of the Filet-O-Fish and the McFlurry to call in a man so closely associated with celebrity barf.

But the fact is that some brands sometimes just get tarnished for ever, and since Morgan Spurlock's 2004 film Super Size Me, McDonald's has become one of those brands. Like Union Carbide, IG Farben, Nestlé, Ratners, Northern Rock, Thalidomide, Chelsea FC...

And, anyway, I don't think punters really want to be served by a better-dressed burger-flipper.

We usually go into McDonald's because we feel terrible. Drunk, hungry, hung-over, barely £2 in our pocket, all self-respect out the window, we push past the weeny bike thieves and kitten-stabbers gathered in the doorway. We keep our stomach together despite the slide of our feet on the cow-greased floor (is there ever not a sign up telling you the floor is slippery?) and the smell of a Swaledale field at the height of the cow-burning epidemic.

We catch sight of ourselves in those mirrors, lit by the merciless white neon overheads (I swear, I still have teenage acne in those mirrors), we jostle amid the giant-arsed women and the bag-snatchers who have come in only because KFC is shut and are grumbling about the high cost of the chicken nuggets, and when we finally come to order, we do not want to be made to talk, thank you very much indeed, to Helena bleeding Christiansen.

You know what I mean? We want a spotty teenage loser in a skid-mark-coloured shirt that drains all the colour from his pasty face. We want a woman, squeezing between the chip-fryer and the milkshake machine, in a blouse you could make into outfits for a whole Brownie pack. We want a man whose polyester shirt sparks in the dark and out of which the smell of BO can never quite be washed. We want someone, in short, who is even lower down the food chain than we are. Someone in whose opinion we are not even slightly interested.

And in front of whom we will not feel bad about buying this crap (in much the same way, I simply cannot buy a porn mag from a beautiful female newsagent - a commodity that is in thankfully short supply). But if we are confronted by some elegant little thing in a designer dress, all clingy, tight little silhouette, curve of back and bulge of breast, then we are going to walk straight out again. We can't have her see us like this. At the very least, we are going to change our order to a glass of orange juice and a salad. We are going to resolve, on the spot, to change our dietary ways to enable us to dream of scoring with somebody who is dressed by Bruce Oldfield.

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