Remember Emma Watson’s speech about how men should be feminists too? I’m calling that as the numero uno influencer on men’s Oscar style this season. How else to explain that after 47 million years in which women wore colourful gowns on the red carpet, and the men rose above all that nonsense in identical black tuxedos, the 2015 Oscar red carpet was almost as multi-hued among the men as it was among the women? The message here: we’re all in this together. So modern!

Big names in fashion and film shuffle along the front row to let supermodel squeeze in to see Christopher Bailey’s folksy, hand-crafted collection

The Burberry catwalk show, being these days not so much a fashion parade as a key messaging moment for one of the giant brands of the modern age, waits for no one. Not even Naomi Campbell.

The physical audience at the Kensington Gardens venue for Monday’s Burberry show at London fashion week were dwarfed by the global audience for the live stream. (Burberry opts to show at 1pm GMT, rather than in a more traditionally prestigious evening slot, in order to reach Chinese fans before they go to sleep.)

Unpatriotic though it may be to admit it, one of the most important names at London fashion week is Saint Laurent. The allure of Hedi Slimane-era Saint Laurent is plain as day in the front row, where YSL-initialled bags have overtaken Chanel 2.55s as the trophy of the hour. Topshop, having taken an accurate temperature reading among the in-crowd, produced a collection that mixed Saint Laurent’s insouciant party-girl cool with the 1980s-Kings-Road-Saturday-night vibe zooming up on fashion’s inside lane. A sleazy-shiny skirt worn with a tweed biker and a polo neck, and a lush milk-chocolate velvet jumpsuit, hit catwalk gold.

Related: Topshop Unique's autumn/winter 2015 show - in pictures

‘Denim will always read as a more individual, more adventurous choice, so you can use it to add edge to “straight” outfits’

Denim can be many things – timelessly cool, perennially useful – but smart isn’t generally one of them. Denim stands for the outdoors, freedom, rebellion: the antithesis of what we need to look smart for. This is not just me projecting, either. Look at denim – feel it: the very texture is weathered and rugged, like sunshine and showers. A fine wool-mix, by contrast, feels homogeneous and smooth, like air-conditioning. That’s why people wear jeans to the office on Fridays: it sends the message that you’re a free spirit, about to ride off into the sunset to pursue your dreams. Which, on a Friday, you sort of are, even if you’re just riding home on your bike to order a takeaway.

But, this season, denim is looking uncharacteristically establishment. This started on the Burberry catwalk, where denim jackets came smartly waisted, nipped into the hourglass shape of classic haute couture tailoring, and were worn with sequined skirts. Context is everything, and this particular catwalk moment was an image that subtly recalibrated the meaning of denim. While jeans were domesticated and harnessed to the yoke of designer fashion long ago, the denim jacket has until now been a symbol of youthful rebellion.

When the star of Frida and From Dusk Till Dawn first arrived in Hollywood, she was dismissed for sounding like ‘a Mexican maid’. As she prepares to showcase her new film at the Women of the World festival, she talks about women’s rights and how she became a power-player in the movies

Unsisterly though it sounds, I didn’t expect to like Salma Hayek very much. Because we both go to a lot of catwalk shows, I see her all the time: I’m there as a reporter, and she’s there because her husband Francois-Henri Pinault is the CEO of Kering, the luxury group that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta, among others. There, she rocks a kind of boss’s wife vibe, dressed to the nines in the designer’s clothes. Or at least that’s how it had always come across to me. And I’d watched her new film, an animation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, aimed at families: a “passion project” that is charming, beautifully crafted, impeccably well-intentioned – but, nonetheless, could perhaps do with wearing its learning a little more lightly.

Expecting grandeur, I am a little taken aback to arrive at the Park Cafe, appointed by Hayek’s people for our interview, to find it isn’t an ironically named smart restaurant, as I had assumed. It’s the kind of cafe where you queue with a plastic tray, next to a noticeboard of flyers for Monkey Music and community gardening projects, for a polystyrene cup of PG Tips with the teabag left in. It’s not quite somewhere I can picture Hayek – Oscar nominee, billionaire’s wife, Hollywood bombshell – hanging out, so I wait outside. Sure enough, when she arrives – tiny, radiant, swathed in cashmere, flanked by a bodyguard and an assistant who is being dragged along by Hayek’s golden labrador, Lolita – it turns out this isn’t the place she had in mind. But she’ll show me the way, she says, leading me in the direction of a restaurant elsewhere in west London’s Holland Park, chatting merrily about nothing in particular – the weather, Milan fashion week, how she needs a coffee.

I would die if I did nothing but manicures and lunches. That would be a nightmare to me

Related: Salma Hayek on why Frida Kahlo was a great artist

Related: Salma Hayek on religion, the pope and The Prophet

The amount of pressure on women now, it’s crazy. We need to give ourselves a break

The designer’s vision for Balenciaga, his own label and H&M has made him a 21st-century fashion superstar. He explains how Danielle Steel inspired him, why he turned down Diane von Furstenberg and why ‘active, easy’ dressing matters

My lunch date walks into the lobby of the Tribeca Grand hotel in New York, shrugging off his heavy black coat as iced air off the Hudson river gives way to the sleepy fug of lobby warmth. In black jeans and charcoal grey crewneck, tucking his phone and white earbuds into a pocket, bouncing boyishly on his sneakers, you might at first peg him as, say, a Silicon Valley whiz-kid rather than a top-flight fashion designer. But then he gets nearer, and the grey crewneck reveals itself to be the finest double-ply cashmere, and his hair is in a perfectly-imperfect man-bun, and the twentysomethings at the next table recognise him and swivel in their seats to get a better look, and there is no mistaking who it is: Alexander Wang, the 21st century’s fashion superhero.

Alexander Wang is a name that means everything to the younger generation, and almost nothing to their parents – which, of course, is exactly why the kids love it. A few days after my lunch with Wang, the New York Times ran a feature on the Wang sample sale, profiling the shoppers who arrived at 5am for a below-zero four-hour wait to buy discounted handbags and clothes. Mostly, they were 25 and under. It is no coincidence that Wang’s jeans-and-monochrome look is closer to Mark Zuckerberg than to Karl Lagerfeld, because he comes from the generation for whom technology is at the heart of everything they do. When he revealed he was working on last year’s out-of-the-box-hit high street collaboration, Wang x H&M, the news did not come in office hours via a press release: instead, it was launched on Instagram, at midnight on a Saturday.

Fashion has a new silhouette. The look has an ankle-length hemline on skirts and wide-leg trousers, elongated vests with unrestricted torsos. It’s striking, it’s simple, it changes everything. We’re in

See more from The Fashion: editors’ picks

‘I guess I had written off flares, to be honest, and had started thinking of them as comedy fashion’

This is not a drill; this is actually happening. Flares. Believe me, no one is as surprised as me. I did not anticipate, even when I watched 1970s styles crop up again and again on the catwalks for this season’s collections, that I would be wearing flares either on this page, or in real life. I guess I had written off flares, to be honest, and had started thinking of them as comedy fashion. The sort of thing you would wear as part of a themed disco fancy dress outfit, along with stupid sunglasses and a nylon afro.

Essentially, like Michael Fish and the hurricane, I underestimated the strength of the 1970s revival we are experiencing. The good news is that what is appealing about flares never changes: they break the rules, challenge fashion’s straight-and-narrow mindset, and that’s always an appealing gang to be in. Also, the width at the ankle is flattering to the girth of the thigh. On the other hand, that rule-breaking mindset is so closely associated with a certain era that it’s not easy to wear flares without actually looking groovy.

Designer Phoebe Philo delights in springing surprises on the fashion industry with Sunday’s show, littered with images of otters and foxes, her latest curveball

On the list of looks you do not expect to see on the catwalk at Céline, fashion’s Parisian temple to cerebral chic, cute woodland animals rank pretty high.

Riccardo Tisci took a dramatic turn away from dramatic femininity with bold piercings, lace and ‘Victorian-chola girl’ style

Moustaches and facial hair are the latest trend in Paris. And while East London can claim to have got there first, Paris fashion week has taken the look a step further – this time, it’s for women.

Each and every model on the Givenchy catwalk was decorated – or disfigured, depending on your point of view – by a crust of crystals or shimmering jet, which almost obscured her features. Vast earrings suspended from the lower, middle and upper lobes swung from each side of the face, while chunky strings of jewels hung across the upper lip, suspended from the septum. Gems the size of drawing pins studded the chin, cheeks and cheekbones. Meanwhile, fuzzy kiss curls were teased out of the models’ hairlines and plastered slickly to their faces.

Despite Cara Delevingne, Kanye West and dad Paul in attendance, all eyes were on McCartney’s elegant, relaxed collection

What gets a supermodel out of bed in the morning? Linda Evangelista once famously said it was nothing less than $10,000. For Cara Delevingne, it seems a Stella McCartney fashion show is enough – but only just.

“You made it!” exclaimed McCartney in surprise as Delevingne appeared backstage today, weaving in amongst the catwalk models filing in from the finale. “10 minutes ago, they told me you were still in bed. But look, you’ve got a face on and everything,” she said, noting the smoky eye make-up and giving Delevingne a hug. “Yeah, I just woke up,” the model replied, talking through her camera-ready smile as the paparazzi closed in on the pair. “I’ve still got my make-up on from last night.”

Since leaving No 10, Sarah Brown has campaigned for global health and education. She explains why she has teamed up with a luxury jewellery brand for her current ambitious project

Sarah Brown – global campaigner for health and education, ex-prime minister’s wife, Twitter star– wants to talk about jewellery. Actually, what she really wants to talk about are the 57 million children worldwide who will never get a day in school. But a top-flight career in public relations and 13 years in residence at numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street have made Brown an expert on how to make people listen to and engage with a message, and these days she is convinced of the benefit of fashion as a campaigning partner. And so she is here to promote the bracelet she is wearing, made from sterling silver woven with sky-blue silk thread, sales of which will benefit Brown’s global education charity, A World at School.

The challenge of such a cause is that no one disagrees with it. There is no controversy with which to seize attention. “No one is going to say: ‘Oh no, I don’t think children should go to school,’” says Brown. We are 30 floors above Liverpool Street station, London, in the building where her charity works and Gordon’s non-parliamentary offices are based. Brown, smartly dressed in navy trousers and jacket and a scarf printed with abstract squiggles, is friendly and warm in person, although she positively bristles with efficiency. Several times, when a question starts to ramble, she dives in and crisply rewords it for me before answering. It is not done in a rude or domineering way, but as the instinct of someone who can’t imagine wasting time.

Skinny jeans, leopard print and a rockstar-heavy front row. It must be the Saint Laurent autumn/winter 2015 collection

Walking into a Saint Laurent fashion show feels like walking onto the set of the brand’s ad campaign: the dark walls and stark lighting, the bare bones band’s-dressing-room interior. The skinny limbs in black jeans, the look-at-me-don’t-look-at-me sunglasses and hats. (This goes for the boys as well as the girls, by the way. Very egalitarian, like that.) The sense that you’ve walked into a party where everyone knows everyone else and is laughing together about the even-cooler party they were at last night, that you didn’t know about.

The thing is, of course, that walking into a Saint Laurent fashion show is indeed exactly like walking onto the set of a Saint Laurent advert, because creative director Hedi Slimane doesn’t just design clothes, he designs every aspect of the brand’s message, and he ensures it infuses everything. He shoots the advertising campaigns himself, the better to ensure they project his vision of Saint Laurent Paris, as the brand is now officially known.

Designer’s brasserie-set show gave us a wearable collection of silk shirts, knee-length skirts and cosy blazers, perfect for a stolen half-hour in a Left Bank cafe

Karl Lagerfeld is a man on a mission. “I fight against French-bashing,” the designer said after his Chanel catwalk show, a celebration of what makes the country great.

And, this being Chanel at Paris fashion week, what makes France great is what makes France chic; in other words, café culture.

Related: Karl Lagerfeld's garden-themed show raises a smile for Chanel

A death knell sounded in Paris – minimalism, the trend that made plain and simple the height of chic, is over. More is more ruled the Paris runways. Dries Van Noten’s Wednesday show was an assault on the senses – with an a capella soundtrack of pop’s power women; Kanye West and Jane Birkin on the front row, and a collection that, as a rule, piled several prints, colours, textures and fabrics on top of one another. Elsewhere, Olivier Rousteing’s Balmain collection had a rich-woman type of maximalism – with gold, shoulder pads, frills and vibrant colours centre stage – while Dior had thigh-length PVC boots, mega-long ponytails and cat’s eye makeup as standard. Hardly subtle but hard to ignore. LC

Sarah Burton’s latest collection for the luxury label imported the theme of the English rose to a Parisian venue generally associated with the French Revolution

The very last moments before its petals begin to drop are when a rose is at its most beautiful. This was the idea at the core of Sarah Burton’s latest Alexander McQueen collection, staged at the Conciergerie in Paris, the vaulted dungeon where Marie Antoinette was held before being taken to the guillotine.

“I started by looking at women and the female form and the rose, and the idea that something can be so beautiful as it is on the verge of decay,” said Burton after Tuesday’s show.

The brand’s creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière, has remodelled the French label’s long-vaunted ideal of ambition for today’s world of iPhones and iPads

Ambition lies at the heart of the Louis Vuitton brand. The scale of that ambition is hard to miss at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the new Paris museum of contemporary art: it is badged above the door with a glittering LV, a giant version of the hardware used on the bags.

That ambition is spelt out again when you pass through the museum and into the catwalk show space built alongside it, a trio of sunny, silvered glass globes which Vuitton designer Nicolas Ghesquière described backstage as his “space observatory station”.

A record number of advance tickets have been sold for the V&A’s retrospective on the late designer’s work. It is the best-dressed haunted house you will ever visit

Much has been said and written recently about both the salacious aspects of Alexander McQueen’s lifestyle and about the complex, densely referenced mind which conceived some of the most beautiful dresses of our times.

Related: Preview night of Savage Beauty by Alexander McQueen – in pictures

‘The long skirt – not just a smidge below the knee, but almost to the floor – is vying with Twin Peaks to be to 2015 what Kate Bush was to last year’

I never actually thought long skirts would come back into fashion. I thought they were over in the way pounds, shillings and pence are over and knowing friends’ landline numbers off by heart is over. Over like side-saddle dresses, and bustles. But I was wrong. (It happens.) The long skirt – not just a smidge below the knee, which has always been a thing, but almost to the floor – is vying with Twin Peaks to be to 2015 what Kate Bush was to last year.

In very specific scenarios, long skirts have always been doable. For evenings on holiday, for instance, especially for those of us who are mosquito catnip, they are agreeably loungy. But then the whole point of evenings on holiday is that you just sit outside in a fabulously slothful way, lounging around the table for hours after you’ve finished eating, without having to jump up to pack PE bags or deal with work emails, so you don’t have to worry about whether you’re going to trip over on the stairs. Plus, you’ve got a tan and had loads of sleep, so you look amazing in pyjamas.

Denim skirts, broderie anglaise and big hats: this season’s inspiration is the 1970s, as your mum wore it. Fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley gets out the family photos, along with musicians Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Marina Diamandis and the Staves

Often, when I watch a season of catwalk shows, the same character keeps coming into my mind. This is not because I’ve got special powers; it is sort of the point of having a whole month of fashion shows – to establish the character who defines that season. It’s in the clothes, obviously, but also the music, the hairstyles, the way the models walk. The character might be Paloma Picasso one season and Debbie Harry the next. It’s been Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface at least twice in the past decade, and it’s Grace Kelly about one season in three. But watching this season’s collections was a first. Because the catwalk muse was my mum.

OK, not my mum specifically. A lot of people’s mums. All those of us with 1970s childhoods – which, the front row demographic being what it is, is a lot of us – were having the same experience, because the muse for this season is the 70s Mum. The silky, thrift-shop faded blouses at Chloé, the denim skirts with plaited leather belts at Gucci. The pinafores at Sonia Rykiel, the broderie anglaise blouses at Erdem. These were glossily updated versions of clothes we’ve seen in our childhood photo albums. If you can picture yourself learning to ride a Chopper bike or watching Happy Days on TV, then the mum you can picture in the background is the woman you want to be this season.