A woman wearing £3,700 sequinned knickers, trays of free pashminas and Anna Wintour in a silver coat of armour to save the world… JAN MOIR joins the fash pack madness of Vogue World

You know you’re at a high fashion event when there’s a man in a Little Red Riding Hood outfit, a woman with feather horns and people wearing ankle socks with shorts who aren’t toddlers.

You know you’re at a high-fashion event when those same people aren’t just wearing an outfit, but making a statement.

Like Nina Tiari from New York, who wears a sweater, tights and pink sequined Miu Miu panties that cost her £3,700. You must mean dollars, I mutter, trying to pretend it’s completely normal to pay a four-figure sum for a pair of pants in any currency.

“No, I mean your British pounds,” she says. Nina is a clothing designer who understands how it all works. ‘Value is relative. I don’t buy these panties because I like them. I bought them to make a statement. I wanted Anna to notice me.’

Naturally. Anna! Cue lightning bolt and ominous music.

Vogue World is the brainchild of Dame Anna Wintour, the formidable supremo of Vogue magazine, who is in a serious silver trench here tonight. What statement is Anna trying to make in her shining armor? That maybe she’s a Tin Man who needs a heart?

This would certainly play into her reputation as the most fearsome woman in fashion, an icy commander capable of organizing a major event like this, right down to the carb-free canapés that are supposed to support British art, but in reality, marketing is about the Vogue brand.

Vogue World is an evening of entertainment at the Theater Royal in London’s Drury Lane, a new red carpet event that Anna hopes will one day rival her infamous Met Ball in New York.

Small booklets handed to guests claim the evening is being held to ‘celebrate iconic British creatives from Shakespeare to Stormzy’.

So far so great, even if I’m not sure William Shakespeare needs the publicity boost provided by Princess Eugenie emerging in a squat wreath of turquoise satin or Sienna Miller’s baby bump bursting through her Schiaparelli puffball skirt like a peach floating in a punch bowl.

The aim of the exercise, Vogue claims, is nothing less than securing ‘the future of Britain’s rich cultural scene’, with proceeds going to ‘the National Theater and Royal Opera House, and much more ‘.

Good for them, even if no mention is made of the fact that the National Theater already receives £16 million from the government each year and the Royal Opera House is the beneficiary of an annual Arts Council Grant of £22 million.

More is needed, of course, there is always more needed, but Vogue gives the fleeting, self-serving impression that it is somehow single-handedly saving the art world from certain destruction.

There is certainly no mention of any support from the Conservative Government, only a statement in London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s program saying that we must do ‘all we can’ to ‘support the sector during the ongoing crisis of the cost of living’. Well, we could drop the Ulez plan for starters, said no one at the event.

What I understand now about Vogue World is that it is not one world, but many worlds, and most of those worlds are off-limits, behind a velvet rope, entry forbidden unless you happen to be Kate Moss or a Delevingne or the person who created it the person who assists knows the person who polishes the buckles of Anna’s party shoes.

We are not allowed to go to the tequila bar, to the first floor balcony, to the Cecil Beaton bar or to the official after party at Mayfair club George. I’m not complaining. It’s just how it is.

Guests who have paid around £500 for a ticket are asked to take public transport and arrive two to three hours before the show starts. I would love to witness the outburst that would follow if they told Naomi Campbell to do the same. When we civilians arrive, we are rushed down the red carpet (“keep moving, keep moving”) and hurried to the reception rooms on the upper floor of the theater, leaving the coast clear for the celebrities.

Each guest receives a rose upon arrival. What is this for, I ask? “There will be a throwing moment inside,” he says. I bet it is. To throw up or to throw down, that is the question, as the rising playwright W. Shakespeare once almost wrote.

Upstairs in the Burberry Grand Salon, the waiters serve crab croquettes, buttered radishes, walnut and quince snacks and bowls of hard-boiled eggs topped with haddock cream – exactly all the things, I’d say, you don’t want to eat at a party.

Sparkling wine is liberally served as silent men walk through the crowd with lacquered trays full of complimentary Coach pashminas. Well, it doesn’t matter if I do.

I’m talking to Susan Mutesi, an announcer from Australia, who is wearing a giant wheel of orange netting, a silver ring around her breasts and a big smile. Susan, you look sensational, but how do you go to the toilet? ‘I haven’t been there yet. I don’t know if I dare,” she says.

Choreographer Sean Bankhead wears a three-piece Shantung Dolce & Gabbana suit that looks like it was cut into his body. “No shirt, I thought I’d take my chest out tonight,” he says.

Someone is wearing a captain’s cap, someone is wearing red tinfoil, someone is wearing a look I described in my notebook as “rasta virgin nun.”

Somehow the nun, Susan and her cartwheel, Nina in her pants, Mrs. Tinfoil and I all make it into the theater for the 45 minute show. Forty-five minutes! Is that it? Yet it was largely pretentious nonsense. Many must have been happy that it was so short.

It started with old, inveterate Kate Moss being applauded for her interpretive dance under a gauze curtain. It featured an utterly cringe-worthy Shakespearean (him again) duet between Stormzy and Sophie Okonedo. Worst of all was a comedy skit in which Damian Lewis, Sienna, James Corden and others pretended to be theater ushers and made fun of the non-celebrities in the audience.

There were magical moments: the London Community Gospel Choir, the performance of the original four nineties supermodels, with Christy Turlington (always my favorite) looking like she hadn’t aged a bit.

But by the time Dame Harriet Walter came in a frenzied quiff to make a plea to all the actors and actresses taking to the stage across the country, my patience had worn thin. Did they need more money? Well, they could always work in a shop.

The evening ended with singer Annie Lennox dancing around in a jacket that said God Save The World in rhinestones.

We don’t need God for that, dears, we have Vogue magazine.