SKINNY jeans

This month's Skinny Jeans must be prefaced with a health warning. Stay in your seats and try to remain calm, but it has become apparent that Ford Models and YouTube have combined forces to take over our lives.

Whilst the dangers of twin opiates, MySpace and Facebook, are best left explained by someone with an hourly-refresh habit and a considerably longer Friends-list, I will be the one brewing the coffee and setting out the chairs at TubeAnon.

YouTube does not want me to do any work.

It wants me to play videos of Heidi Montag from The Hills writhing mindlessly on a beach to her own joyless pop song; and when I'm done, it recommends I see the excruciating making-of featurette. It is an enabler: lighting up the next before the first one goes out, and the Ford Models channel is, if you'll extend the metaphor, my illicit substance of choice.

It all started with the Ford Artist videos - the step-by-step guides to false eyelash application, and the interviews with Michael Kors on handbag design - but the Models soon took me over. Clearly dissatisfied with employees whose talents are confined to walking and smiling, the agency has demanded its mannequins come to life. Accordingly, armed with nondescript sets, a full crew, and no particular remit, the models have jammed YouTube with a four-hundred strong set of clips that are not so much dumb, as utterly bewildering and pathologically compelling.

Take, for starters, the 20-minute hotel room workout for your chest and "tri", hosted by model Jeff Kunard. Watching Jeff hoist a trolley case repeatedly behind his head, it's becomes clear that 'tri' is to Jeff what "tricep" is to the rest of the English-speaking world. This lax command of biology resurfaces in his confusing confession that workouts are crucial, as he has "just had a baby".

Tara Stiles is a similarly suspect model instructor, whose 'Yoga for Feet' segment suggests that she is unsure of the technique, and indeed the point, of her demonstration. As we "press the toes, um, and do that, and, uh, then go back," we're conquering that silent killer, foot cramps: "This will help strengthen your feet so you won't get so many cramps, and it also helps alleviate foot cramps whilst you're having them." When not ridding the world of extremity spasms, Tara can be found conducting a 'Girl on Girl' Yoga session, with a brunette named Desiree Dymond, and no discernible awareness of innuendo.

So when that big cosmic accountant calls me to answer, and demands to see my wasted youth, I'll have to show him Jeff and Tara. We'll also swing by Leann's organic face masks, and Shanna's exotic swimwear, where she'll do a twirl in her bra made out of seashells, that she designed but must hold tightly, having been unable to engineer a fastening. We'll look, and he'll make a joke about models being stupid, but he'll have missed the point.

Stupid is irrelevant.

Models are YouTube and YouTube is models. Stupid? Sometimes. Frivolous? Probably.

But we are still compelled to look.