IF there’s one word  guaranteed to elicit a snort of derision from me, it’s ‘designer’.

The notion that a product suddenly acquires enormous cachet, justifying an equally enormous price premium, by prefixing it with ‘designer’ seems an outrageous stretch of credulity.

As the father of  three boys, one just entered into his teenage years, I know all about peer pressure and street cred.

I have had to endure those rows in shops when all efforts to steer, cajole, threaten and bribe youngsters into accepting a sturdily functional and reasonably priced item of clothing or footwear are met with sulky stubborn insistence on the latest blinged-up, overpriced product hyped by celebrity endorsement and/or TV advertising.

“No, Dad, it’s not that they cost £90 or that Ronaldo wears them, they really are much better that those £25 football boots you made me try on.”

Yeah, right.

For teenage boys (and probably girls, too), it’s all about showing off. Having the most expensive or flashiest gear gives you some sort of status among your mates, not least, I suppose, the inference that you have your parents well and truly cowed into submission.

But they’ll grow out of it soon enough, when they have to pay for stuff themselves, won’t they?

I used to think so, but I’m not so sure any more.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in this ever more homogenous and over-regulated society, the more people are forced to conform, the more they seek the cult of individuality, and never mind the cost.

They’d rather eat rubbish food and stay in than be seen out in anything less than top bling.

Designer gear lifts them above the common herd, doesn’t it?

Well, no, actually. You still end up looking like everyone else in your peer group, but at much greater expense. And then when the common herd get on your track, you have to move on. Consider the Burberry chavs of yesteryear …

And I think the conceit of manufacturers sticking their logos and labels on the outside of their garments is just a con in the emperor’s-new-clothes mould.

A brilliant con, mind you, as we are paying them through the nose to advertise their wares for them, instead of the other way around.