In Thailand and Laos there can be no greater disparity between the image of a Thai or Laos woman walking down the road and her Farang (meaning West European, usually white) equivalent.

Indochina women are feminine, slim but not thin and walk and dress with a modesty and grace that is mesmerising for both its simple beauty and compelling sexuality. Even the Ferang women stare at the beautiful Indochina women as the sashay by.

Sadly, the Farang woman looks hopelessly out of place, with mid-riffs bared reavealing a fat belly, tight, low slung jeans ill-advisedly worn revealing two volkswagons in a sack and a thin strip of material that tries and fails to be a brassiere. And Farang women don't seem to have the comportment, they waddle or flop or stamp around, possibly it's the oppressive heat here, but grace and femininity seems to be a lost cause to most Ferang women. It also offends Indochina's deeply conservative modesty concerning dress; men seem to be sensibly in compliance with the dress code, women as often as not simply seem not to care about it.

Back in Britain 'builders arse' is the term used in Britain to describe the questionable habit of beer-bellied male members of the construction industry to bare the craks of their buttocks above low slung, baggy jeans.

In Loiusiana, a legislator now wants to ban low-slung jeans that expose both male and female pants that expose either the naked cleft or the underwear of the offending person. I have some sympathy for this bill, in Britain, the US Australia and elsewhere in the world, young women and those that have lived long enough that they really should know better have been exposing their lardy bellies for at least a year now. The growing obesity epedemic in Britain and the long established one in the US seems to have convinced millions of women that having rolls of ugly wobbling fat spilling over jeans with waist lines five sizes too small is somehow attractive and desirable.

It is not.

There are so many female fashion victims wandering the Western world that an international state of emergency should be declared at once, and sensible fashion gurus should be drafted in to help these hapless, deluded and visually unattractive women see sense. Fashion sense. Not since the days of leggings, when women that were twenty stone or more insisted on cramming and prising their corpulent rolls of flab into skin tight jogging pants has there ever been a more off putting sight.

Women have forgotten that most extremes of fashion can only be carried off if you are a starving stick insect that shoves two fingers down her throat every time she swallows a polo mint to conceal her bad breath. And now the low slung jeans that threaten to expose young womens clefts and pubic hair are hoving with ill deserved confidence to the front of the parade of what not to wear in public, if at all.

If they are beautiful and young, I'm all for it. But if I see stretch marks, cellulite or grey spider legs peeping out of pants that stop just above the knees, then there can be little choice, the fashion police must be called.

There are many large women that kow how to dress appropriately and sexily for their size, but possibly because there are so many overweight women now a 'safety in numbers' mentality has developed, a sort of 'well if she can get away with it so can I!' defiance against all logic, reason and individual fashion sense. But wind the clock back just two years ago, and certainly in Britain, there was not this epedemic of in your face corpulence waddling around in sweaty lumps, and I cannot believe that British women and men have become suddenly fat and obese over the same period. No, it had to be down to dress sense or lack of it.

It's time for women to re-learn the lesson that their Indochina counterparts practice so effortlessly every day. That is, covering up is often much more tantalising to the eye, much more intriguing and infinitely more feminine and sexy than simple letting it all hang out - literally.