IT’S A STRANGE STATE of affairs when the only relief in New York from an Orange Alert (terror threat: high) is a snowstorm that creates a state of emergency.

Acts of God keep happening lately — a reminder of the futility of rhetoric. The shuttle explosion gave us a frisson about high technology. The snowstorm that envelops the urban world in silence, grounds planes and helicopters and forces Bush to make a two-hour car crawl to the White House is another rap across hubris’s knuckles. Buried under five feet of snow at our house on the wild Atlantic coast with the happy knowledge that it’s impossible to get out, I feel almost drunk with safety for the first time in weeks.

We need an intermission from anxiety after the last round of the willies. It was anxiety, rather more than any abstract passion for “peace”, that brought hundreds of thousands into the East Side avenues the day before the snow started falling. The same perfectly reasonable hysteria has people all over town wondering if they should turn their bathrooms into panic rooms. I go into mine and scream from time to time, but I don’t find it reassuring.

A banker friend of mine on the East Side pays for two parking spaces in the garage under his apartment, so that when the next attack comes there will be no vehicle in front of him to impede his squealing getaway to his helicopter pad.

Comically, we have just been through New York Fashion Week. I went to a few of the shows and watched a Ralph Lauren model with a dazed expression high-stepping down the runway in a jaunty newsboy cap, tight little jacket, and svelte-assed loden knickers. It was all vaguely Siegfried Sassoon era. Oh, Oh, Oh! It’s a Lovely War. Given what was happening at the United Nations 20 blocks uptown, it was a valiant try. No fashion show has felt the same since the curtain came down on a former world the night of the Marc Jacobs show on September 10, 2001.

Remember that night? Most people recall what they were doing on the eve of the day that changed it all. I was sitting restively in the front row next to Monica Lewinsky and the real estate mogul Donald Trump listening to the buzz of fashion trivia. After the show, Vogue’s impeccably chic Anna Wintour advanced towards her limo under twin umbrellas held aloft by runway flunkeys, and sped away in a splash of puddles and paparazzi. The memory of the last gaudy event before the tragedy is a snapshot from a carefree pagan past. The next day all those jostling fashion tents were empty. The gadabouts of the night before were out giving blood. Though the world resumed its homage to glitz, I haven’t seen Monica anywhere since. The Post-Modern kitsch of inviting her to sit at a table at the Oscars or the White House Correspondents dinner has lost its charm. Monica’s big, confessional eyes remind us only of the nonsense that dominated the news at the turn of the century, distracting us from the only story we care about now.

At the UN, an uncharacteristically rattled Colin Powell delivered his almost plaintive plea for war, but in the fashion cave that day, the Ralph Lauren girls whisked by in silver moonbeam skirts and white-moire satin eskimo hoods. Who are we kidding? Retail, along with everything else, except duct tape, is tanking. Even this crowd, which hitherto saw Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, only as a possible candidate for the best-dressed list, knows that to be at a fashion show at all is brunch at the apocalypse.

The soundtrack at the Ralph Lauren runway suddenly blasted an old Bob Dylan classic and the ratty followers of fashion glanced around looking, briefly, happy. Once upon a time it was perfectly OK for them not to care about public life. They could engage with the world when they wanted to, like signing up for an activity at school. They could be “up to speed” on politics, “actively engaged” in social issues, “deeply committed” to a cause. When it suited them.

Now the emotional tenor of their lives, like everyone else’s, is being micromanaged by big-foots who have the power to colour-code their physical safety and, even worse for fashion folk, darken their mood.

The youthful Dylan moment passed. At Donna Karan’s in the afternoon the music was back to some kind of clanking, toilet-flushing, sci-fi cacophony that reminded us all over again that Orange is the new black this year.

IS IT JUST THE RESIDUE of fashion week that makes me wish there were more, or should I say any, gay men in the Bush Administration? At The Sunday Times in the Seventies one top editor used to shake his head when the paper became too humourlessly high-testosterone and say that what it needed that week was “more pooftah power”.

In lieu of outright womanhood — except for Condoleezza Rice, who crosses the gender barriers by becoming the most zealous enabler — perhaps an injection of androgyny could be brought to bear on diplomatic relations in this moment of crisis. The Bush crowd’s only management style, like that of many who subscribe to the outmoded cult of America’s Toughest Bosses, is to unzip and thwack it on the table. As Senator Robert Byrd put it in his speech last week, they deal in “crude insensitivities”.

The offence of it is enhanced by the fact that we know how unauthentic Bush is in this role of macho man. Unlike the war vet Powell, who never swaggers, he has no credentials for talking the tough talk.

Bush never said that the trouble with the French is that they have no word for “entrepreneur” — that turned out to be an urban legend. But I wish we had a leader who did not believe that “nuance” was strictly for cheese eaters.