In fashion, you never know what’s coming round the next corner, even if it’s a truck. “Safquat, my butler, will take you to Gare du Nord,” is, in retrospect, the single most terrifying line anyone has uttered to me in the 14 years I’ve been reporting for The Australian Financial Review Magazine.

It was 2015 and I was in Paris to interview Christian Louboutin, the shoe designer, who had been so entertaining that we had overrun. There was a taxi strike (Paris, eh? There’s always a strike), yet I could not miss my train. So a small man on a small scooter whizzed me to the Eurostar and I, being not so small, feared my haunches would be trimmed by oncoming traffic.