The real challenge for the ‘Fors' was always going to be defending fashion's promotion of fantasyland, prepubescent physiques. Paula Reed valiantly tried in her opening address, citing recent catwalk crackdowns on models with unhealthy BMIs as proof the industry is re-evaluating its attitude to emaciation. Meanwhile, Madelaine Levy took an alternate line of defence, suggesting that fashion could be our friend in the face of contemporary culture's obsession with physical perfection. Fashion, she claimed, helped her to feel good by concealing her vices with flatter dressing: "I like good food and want to work long hours in a job I love," she reasoned, apparently failing to see the irony in the fact that the bony-fingered hand that feeds her mind's eye with images of twig limbs is the same one cooing and cajoling her into 'making the best of what she's got'. In a bid to address the issue of women's 'overreaction' to images of thinness, Levy drew the following intelligent if ultimately fallacious analogy: why did reading Einstein not give her a sense of mental inferiority, where poring over the latest copy of Vogue prompted a pique of physical angst? (She stopped short of considering that if every advert, film, magazine or vestige of culture promoted cerebral genius with the same fervour, we'd probably be suffering from a pandemic of anaretardorexia instead.)

Grayson Perry made the valid point that, by choosing not to use thin models, designers can unwittingly find themselves making a body politicised statement. But while clothing as art might require anthropomorphic coathangers to best showcase its genius, surely clothing as, well, clothing - i.e. the garments that Everywoman wears - should aim to fit and flatter, rather than demoralise and enfetter those that just have to get dressed each morning.  Certainly Susie Orbach, who finished arguing against the motion by quoting Mary Wollstonecraft, reminded us of the strictures routine objectification has on the female psyche: 'Taught from infancy that beauty is women's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming rounds its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison'.

It supported something I'd been considering throughout the whole debate: if fashion is so empowering, why doesn't your average white Western heterosexual man invoke its 'power' quite so readily? When it comes to women harnessing their privilege as agents of display, I'm the first to flag up the potency of the Active Object. But film stars and footballers aside, it's no coincidence that fashion is still mainly the preserve of women and gay men, both traditionally subordinate to straight male dictates.

At an Intelligence Squared event, the audience votes on the motion both before and after the debate.  By the end of the debate, the number of those in support of the motion had dropped from 335 to 293, while the number of those previously against it - 318 - had risen to 468. The consensus, then, was that women should revel in the democracy of dressing, rather than the fickle stricture of fashion.  Or, as Stephen Bayley flourished: 'Be a victor, not a victim'.