The above photograph, taken at London fashion week, shows Anna Wintour, the 59-year-old editor of American Vogue, trying with all her might to pretend Pixie Geldof, 19, and Alexa Chung, 25, don’t exist or even breathe the same air as she does. I wish I knew whether the resulting Geldof/Chung acting up were indicative of discomfort or whether they didn’t remotely care about being so glacially ignored. For all we know they ignored Wintour first: maybe she greeted them with a cheery “Yo, ladies!” and got blanked?

It’s weird that the rarefied world of fashion should present such a stark image of inter-generational awkwardness and discontent. But fashion’s business is to be ahead of the curve and the truth is that along with all the old debates, rich v poor, black v white, a new faultline is appearing: a sort of generation war.

There is an increasing feeling among the young that the baby boomers and Generation Xers availed themselves of all the goodness — free education, decent healthcare, affordable housing, good jobs with prospects and so on — leaving the cupboard bare and the planet on its last legs for Generations Y and Z. Admittedly, this is perhaps not an issue that Geldof and Chung overly concern themselves with, though who knows? Chung, at least, strikes me as being extremely clever.

There was a rousingly angry letter in The Guardian last week from a 23-year-old called George Lewkowicz in response to the CBI saying that universities should raise tuition fees to try to alleviate the funding crisis. “How is it that your generation feels it can continue to shaft my generation?” he wrote. “I am 23 and have many friends who are unemployed due to an economic crisis caused by your generation.

“We can’t afford houses as your generation preferred anything rather than burst the bubble. We will have no oil and will face a climate crisis that your generation has continually refused to fix. And now your generation is proposing raising university tuition fees due to a funding crisis which you caused.”

Lewkowicz had a suggestion: “How about we place a windfall tax on the generation that received funding while in further education? Let’s give you the average £15,000 loan, apply the RPI from the 25 years since you graduated. That’s no interest while you’re at university, as we’re feeling kind. That comes to £373,515. Payable tomorrow. You’ve made this mess,” he concluded. “So you can pay to clear it up.”

Lewkowicz’s anger is shared by many people his age. He’s right, even though retrospective taxation is unlikely to fly with the public. My generation and the one before it greedily helped themselves to everything and now there’s not much left.

In the 1980s greed was good; the 1990s was a decade of near-full employment and credit cards seemed to grow on trees. Everyone was too busy spending to think about saving. Ten years and a recession later, you can barely move for unemployed graduates, many still living at home, since getting onto the housing ladder is about as achievable as sprouting a pair of wings.

According to government figures from this summer, the number of under-25s who are claiming jobseeker’s allowance has increased by 200,000 over the past year to 456,000. Youth unemployment is at its highest rate for 15 years: 18.3% of 16 to 25-year-olds are unemployed.

“The danger is that we have lost a generation,” David Blanchflower, a labour market expert who stepped down from the Bank of England earlier this year, said when the figures were released. David Willetts, the shadow skills secretary, said: “The risk is that young people find themselves on the dole for months, if not years, and in the long run their lifetime earnings are depressed.”

Then, of course, there’s family breakdown. In a speech last year Mr Justice Coleridge, a family court judge, said that the widespread collapse of the family unit “is a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs or global warming.

“Surely the test of any social change is whether it enhances people’s lives or makes them more miserable. And this is where I take issue with the modern view of the family. If it is so successful, why are the statistics for separation so large? More significantly, why are the family courts overwhelmed with cases involving damaged, miserable or disturbed children?”

Being cross with your parents is hardly new. But the anger welling up across an entire generation towards another one is. You may not have liked the sight of your clever mother cooking and producing children with no hope of a career; you may have felt anger at going to school when being hit with a stick in the name of “discipline” was legal; you may even have felt irritated that your hippie parents lay around not being at all parent-like. But nowhere did you feel that your parents’ generation, along with that of your older siblings, had destroyed your chances of a halfway decent life — a nice house, a good job, clean air and so on — through greed and irresponsibility.

Like 19th-century stories about syphilis, the sins of the fathers are being visited on the sons (and daughters) and, unless I’m uniquely unobservant, I don’t see the older generations doing much about it. The kinder ones wring their hands, say “oh dear” and give the spare room a lick of paint; the rest make like Wintour and look stiffly the other way.

I don’t have a magic solution to offer. As a parent of teenage children, though, I do think it’s our job to question the model that served many of us well: work hard, get a good education, go to university and bingo, lovely job, prospects, money. Working hard is always a good idea, but luring children into thinking — as we thought — that the world is their oyster strikes me as a piece of chronic irresponsibility (something that schools, with their adherence to antiquated, Oxbridge-based notions of success, might also bear in mind).

Our children, being children, will inevitably go through a phase of hating us for being their parents; we should at least try to ensure they don’t also hate us for leading them to believe in an impossibility.

Lewkowicz is right: we broke the world. Now what?

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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