The iD Dunedin Fashion Show used to be something I never attended; I would just tell visitors to the city about it.
Like the albatrosses.
But I finally relented and went to the 12th and 14th shows.
Brilliant.
Well, I am including the VIP room beforehand, a social crag not many local citizens actually climb up on.
Wine, food, important people, original art on the walls ... oh yes, brilliant.
I was offered tickets for this year's 15th anniversary, but a dizzying raft of social engagements saw me sadly decline.
Which, if you will forgive the weak fashion pun, was fitting, because I am a very badly dressed man who should not be allowed within 800m of a fashion event, even were it held on the Chatham Islands.
But I did make it to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery to see Tanya Carlson's 17 breathtaking wedding dresses.
Twice.
Call me old-fashioned, but I will probably go again before it finishes at the end of the month.
And like most people in Dunedin, I revelled in the different look and feel the city had during this week, exotically dressed strangers wherever you went.
Even a couture muppet like myself was inextricably swept up in the whole thing.
There was no dress code at the Carlson exhibition and, while I have shuffled into many DPAG exhibitions in the past wearing homeless clothing and odd socks, I felt for Tanya Carlson, I had to pull out all the stops.
So I set about mending the hole in the right knee of my faded 501 jeans.
These jeans have lasted a very long time, while no longer black, more a, sorry for the weak fashion pun again, weary grey, and I was devastated a couple of weeks ago when my little knobbly knee suddenly burst through the right leg.
I know Cher made this look expensive and extremely cool 40 years ago, but as many have said behind my back during those 40 years, Roy is definitely no Cher.
It would be a big call, but the jeans had to go.
But nobody born under Cancer the Crab ever lets anything go.
We are ritualised to the point of absurdity, and these atrophying jeans were the one pair I possessed that actually fitted me.
The rest are ridiculously flawed in pretty much every judgeable way, as is my body, hence the problem.
The frayed and crooked bits where I have inexplicably decided I could fix something with a needle and thread, are particularly distasteful to the human eye.
I have close personal friends who would mend a denim knee-hole for me in five minutes for the price of a pie, but only a lesser man would ask a close personal friend to do such a thing.
I resolved to mend this bad boy myself, not with needle and thread, but with lateral thought and excitement in the heart.
Gaffer tape.
It always works.
I use it for everything.
CRC is pretty useful stuff around the home, and prednisone can stonker just about any domestic disease these days so long as you don't mind your bones turning to eggshell, but nothing beats gaffer tape.
I know, you are thinking that I put it on the outside. Only a cretin would do that. No, I put it on the INside, two pieces, like a cross, and - get this - I coloured the bit that shone through the hole with a black felt pen!
It was like you could hardly tell there had even been a hole, except I forgot the black jeans had gone grey, so you could.
But this was iD fashion week, and the Emerging Designers were often breaking down very similar walls.
I strode into the Carlson wedding dress exhibition, Not All White, like I was wetsuited in Armani.
I stroked my chin as I evaluated each dress (my top five, after an awful lot of chin stroking, were 15, 2, 14, 7 and 11), and nodded politely at everyone who passed, who in turn nodded back, clearly happy with the gaffer-taped felt-coloured wall-breaking Levi's knee.
People with taste.
I really love iD fashion week.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
