KATE MOSS emerges from London fashion week and her little faux-disgrace more famous than ever. Her earnings, apparently, have tripled since her cocaine debacle. She has just signed a contract with Topshop, purveyor of disposable dresses to the public, to design a few high-street staples. And the latest magazine poll pronounces her “The Queen of Cool”. She’s the “hippest person in the world”, it assures us excitedly — which seems faintly ludicrous considering that she barely possesses a pelvis.

Get a grip. What ever happened to counter-culture? When did this faceless spirit of conformity possess us? It’s not that I’ve got anything against Ms Moss: she’s perfectly pretty and I’m frequently assured that she’s frightfully nice. But I do have a problem with that mass-cultural sycophancy that seeks to create a meaningful icon out of a mere clothes horse.

Ms Moss may have a character. But it’s not something that most of us know anything about. Adopting a mute public front, she presents a blank canvas for someone else to fill in. Open any fashion magazine and you will find the colour-by-numbers key. And what happened to individuality?

What happened to that great British export: a bit of traditional eccentricity? Fashion should not be confused with style. They are radically different.

Style is not something you adopt when you don’t know who you are as a sort of substitute for taste. It is not something that can be imposed from without. It is not some whimsical fad that demands Ug boots one season and then floral frocks the next. It cannot be racked up on a rail or flogged over the counter by Rimmel.

Style is more complicated — and more consistent. It arises from within.

Its clothes are accretions of character. To have style is to put on your ideas and attitudes. It is, paradoxically, to strip yourself down to a personality that has been won through moral effort and philosophical rigour — not bought off the peg. And it has nothing to do with wealth.

How dismal to adopt a succession of fashionable outfits with nobody in particular inside them as a contemporary icon. How banal to mistake a mannequin for a real role model. Kate Moss wears more clothes in one day than Gandhi did in a lifetime. But, without any doubt, it was Gandhi who had style.