While attending a fashion show called 'Viva Italia' in Toronto one evening (at which hundreds of women had dressed like famous Italian beauties in homage to the show's guest of honour, Sophia Loren), Ian Brown ran into a striking blonde of his acquaintance.

"S is tall and, in four-inch Manolo Blahnik spikes, was even taller," Brown later recalled. "She was wearing a decisively short, low-cut black silk cocktail dress with a pair of cabbage-sized black and fuchsia roses bunched over her hind parts as a kind of amuse-derriere.

And the flipside? "The dress didn't so much reveal her breasts," he explained, "as pass them around like a tray of baked apples."