Columns

I am in Puerto Banus, visiting my favourite author to talk about her website. Puerto Banus is the sort of place where people dress their dogs in sailor suits. The promenade is lined with palm trees, exercise machines and WiFi hotspots. There's a stainless steel recycling pod for batteries, an armed guard and a man in a silver suit behind a plate glass window. The harbour is filled with luxury shipping. My companion points out James Hewitt. His hair looks unnaturally red to me. Mark Thatcher has just walked by. His hair has gone grey.

There are a great many Russian prostitutes where my author lives. They are polite, they have great cheekbones, but they are too thin to be serviceable. I meet a woman with a Gucci phone. I think her name is also Gucci, as is her dog's name. She probably calls her bloke's private parts Gucci.

Puerto Banus is the epicentre of Spanish posers. I quite like it.

Label of love

Back home in England, I know a graphics designer who owns an Acer laptop. It would be a modest laptop, but there's a Ferrari badge on the lid. The graphics designer pays Acer a lot to be associated with a brand name that represents extreme speed and wealth.

I watch the man in the silver suit emerge from behind his plate glass window carrying the self-same Acer Ferrari computer. The

The same goes for mobile phones. I spot a pale woman flaunting an amusing mobile branded 'Giorgio Armani'. I know it is not a Giorgio Armani, because Giorgio Armani makes frocks and scent. In fact, it's an ordinary Samsung phone with the name Giorgio Armani stuck on it, and in the UK it will set you back £865 over an 18-month contract. But she wears Armani, smells Armani and is damn well going to text Armani if she so chooses. Her prepubescent daughter has her own mobile phone. It is a Prada. Prada makes handbags and shoes, but the phone says Prada, so Prada it must be. In fact it looks fabulous, as does the Armani. Which, of course, is the whole point.

Next season, mother, daughter and silver suit will have abandoned their current Armani, Prada and Ferrari in favour of whatever model is deemed to be the latest fashion. Last season, it was the Ted Baker Button phone; pink for a girl, blue for a boy. Ted Baker makes clothes, and the phone was really a Samsung G600. This year, it's free down at Carphone Warehouse.

That's what fashion is all about. The latest fashion becomes the late fashion. I applaud elegance and beauty in design, and I like the fact that people with more money than sense fund branded prototypes so the rest of us can benefit a year or so later. If it makes people happy to have a David Beckham Motorola M702iS and show it off to their friends, that's fine by me.

It was ever thus. Branded technology has been mainstream since the Mickey Mouse watch was launched at the 1933 Chicago Exposition. That design remains a glorious icon of the times. My regret is that today's branded laptops and mobiles remain iconic only for a brief season.

I'm on the look-out for a Gordon Ramsay GastroPod. It's a bit like an iPod, but it tells you to eff off when it goes out of fashion.