I

hate sales shopping: there is no pleasure to be had in finding things reduced to a fraction of the full price I paid four months previously (especially when that same unworn item is still swinging its full-price ticket in my wardrobe). No, the only good thing about a sale is that it announces a new season — and the only ones I like, therefore, are those in which the sales racks sit alongside rails of shiny, previously unseen stock.

When I say unseen, I mean exactly that. Many of the clothes in store now have neither graced a catwalk nor featured in much editorial. Slightly more commercial and often less expensive than their catwalk counterparts, these are the pre-collections: the pearls of the fashion cycle.