KEY POINTS:
While ladies love a character, madness is not generally considered to be a turn-on in men. Sure there are honourable exceptions, as the lovers of Lord Byron, the Marquis de Sade or Andrew Fagan will attest, but although we love nothing better than patching up a wounded bird, generally speaking, loons of the gibbering, foaming variety don't tend to have much luck with the gals.
It's easy to get carried along in the throes of a romantic passion for a man who's "mad, bad and dangerous to know" but love is far more difficult to sustain when endearing quirks and idiosyncrasies blossom into full blown neuroses and /or personality disorders as a host of women, from Wuthering Heights' Cathy to Kate Moss have found out to their cost.
That's why mad men occupy the place they do on the shadowy outskirts of our culture. They lurk there alongside werewolves and vampires and all of the other bogeymen that terrify and fascinate us.
Mad women, however, are a different story. They're far more photogenic for a start. From Ophelia to the Lady of Shallot, there's nothing like a dame who may or may not be in full possession of her marbles to set the pulses racing and drive artists wild. There is something about the combination of beauty and nuttiness that adds up to high-octane sex appeal, not to mention undeniable glamour.
By this formula it's not hard to explain our current fascination with Amy Winehouse - with her outrageous beehive, her outlandish eyeliner and her preposterously powerful voice. Such a public figure would be a force to be reckoned with if those things alone were the sum of her parts. Throw in the fact that she appears to be a wildly unpredictable, (barely) functioning addict who doesn't seem to give a toss what any of us think of her and the mix becomes intoxicating.
Not only is she media gold, a licence to print newspapers with her weekly lurchings from one bar to the next, she is also a bona fide muse. Her transition from tabloid fodder to fashion icon was cemented at the end of last year when Karl Lagerfeld sent his models down the runway at Chanel sporting full-on 50's bouffants and cat-like flicks of eyeliner in homage d'Amy.
That was the point at which most style watchers stopped caring about how much she drinks, or what drugs she may or may not be taking. Whether or not she's going to rehab has ceased to be the question. The question is, what is she wearing? Because if it's good enough for Kaiser Karl it's good enough for the rest of us.
From then on it was pretty much assured; if Winehouse is wearing it, chances are, very shortly you're going to be wearing it, or wanting it, too.
The trickle-down effect of celebrity fashions is something we've more or less made our peace with by now. Sure it's annoying to think the shops are going to be full of rip-offs of a certain type of handbag weeks after we've seen it dangling from Nicole, Lindsay, or Rachael Zoe's emaciated paw, but by and large most people with an interest in fashion have accepted the inevitable part played by celebrity endorsement when it comes to imbueing an accessory with the "it" factor that translates into shifting units and big sales.
What's happening with someone like Winehouse is a little bit different however. The fact that she has a look that's very much her own and always has means that for all her well-documented personal problems, she actually occupies a more rarefied strata of style than the likes of her designer-endorsed peers in the film and music industries.
Like her fellow chanteuses, Lily Allen, MIA and Cat Power, Winehouse was not created _ rather she came on the scene fully formed, with no need for the tweaking, air-brushing or full-on reinvention that accompanies the career trajectory of so many others. Nobody invented Amy Winehouse; how could you?
Skinny white girl pairing sailor tats and polka dots with hair and makeup nicked from The Shirelles, anyone? Oh yes, and a few missing teeth for good measure?
Show me the fashion maven who predicted that would be inspiring Chanel last December and I'll show you an acid casualty, or a big fat liar.
It's not brain surgery though. Mad women and their catastrophe chic looks have always been hot. The French have known this for years. Look at Emma Bovary; gorgeous, sexy, and nothing if not compulsive in her pursuit of glamour at all costs.
Died roaring of course, but certainly a head-turner in her time.
Then there's Betty Blue. "The St Veronica of VaVa Voom" as one critic christened her. Volcanic, insatiable Betty with her gap-toothed pout and tiny skirts, never so sexy as when she was torching beach huts and maiming the customers in the pizzeria where she worked. Her impetuousness turned to mania and it all ended in tears, but not before Beatrice Dalle inspired a generation of teenage film students with lust or envy, depending on whether you were a boy or a girl when the movie came out in 1986.
And who can forget the tightly buttoned elegance of Catherine Deneuve's beautiful, neurotic Severine in Belle De Jour?
These characters and the women who played them have rightly taken their places in the pantheon of fashion icons. Betty in the bathroom with her smeared lipstick and home-shorn hair. Severine, off to the brothel in her impeccable trenchcoat. Complex women, damaged women, their style and their status as bywords for style in our culture are intrinsically linked to their fragile mental states.
It wasn't just the French who got it either. Hitchcock was quick to cotton on to what audiences like to see. "Torture the women" he said, taking the quote from the playwright Sardou.
It was a maxim he adhered to rigidly, both in his plots and in real life. Marion Crane in Psycho, Melanie Daniels in The Birds, Marnie Edgar in Marnie, all of these female characters were distingushed as much by their mental quirks, their indiscretions, their sexual compulsions as they were by their icy blonde beauty and impeccable outfits. The actresses who played them, Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren, owe their current status as style icons to their time as "Hitch's girls".
There is a compelling attraction in the sight of watching beauty suffer.
Unpalatable as it may be, we cannot tear ourselves away from the fascination of degeneration, whether of the body, or the mind, especially when it happens right before our eyes. How else to explain our current fetishisation of Winehouse in her ever-deteriorating state as the ravages of her drug addiction set in?
Seeing her staggering through the front pages now, drunk and disoriented, her skin raddled from impetigo and the scars of self-harm, I like to think that wasn't what inspired Lagerfeld when he sent his models down the runway in their Amy-inspired beehives. I like to think he was celebrating the originality, the singularity of Winehouse, with her raw talent and bullshit-free persona.
And it makes sense for Lagerfeld, a designer with a mania for the new, the next, the future tense, to see what a special and rare thing she is in a world where our individual style comes pre-packaged and ready-to-wear.
The question now is, as the headlines get louder and the stories more shocking and the liquid eyeliner pens fly out the door, how big an appetite do we have for her madness, for her degeneration, her suffering?
A pretty much insatiable one, if the enduring popularity of Hitchcock films is anything to go by.
Tortured women will never go out of fashion.
