It’s easier to dress well for an evening out than for a normal day. I know that sounds the wrong way round, but it’s true, isn’t it? Because, despite all the hoopla we make about perfect party dresses and heels, dressing for an evening out is straightforward. The brief is clear. Whether you’re an old-school LBD addict or a jeans, silk T, best earrings type, the formulas are easy to apply.

Jumpsuits totally prove my point. For evening, they are a no-brainer. More daring and modern than a dress, more in-it-to-win-it than separates. A black or navy jumpsuit, tailored and with some skin showing at the ankle and shoulder, has been my go-to post-6pm option for ages. (I’m not alone here. Some evenings I feel like a foot soldier in an all-in-one army.)

Raf Simons’ take on florals had little to do with the allure of flowers – his couture fashion show was instead a bold commentary on the commodification of beauty

Much of fashion can be divided into one of two camps: those designers who make indulgent, exquisite dresses for rich women to rule society from within, and those designers who make interesting clothes which reflect on society from the outside.

This makes Raf Simons, creative director of Christian Dior, rather unusual. He makes exquisite dresses for rich women that are also interesting clothes with a sharp point of view.

Karl Largerfeld’s Hollywoodification of fashion continues with Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart adding to the cocktail chic at Paris’s Grand Palais

Coco Chanel said that “in order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different”. Karl Lagerfeld, designer of the house she founded, has kept Chanel at the top of the fashion tree for three decades by applying this maxim every time he stages a catwalk show.

Famous faces on the front row are old news; celebrities on the catwalk have been seen many times before. And so for Paris fashion week, Lagerfeld ramped up the “Hollywoodification” of fashion yet again by having Julianne Moore, Kristen Stewart, Vanessa Paradis and Lily Collins act a scene in a make-believe casino in the middle of the catwalk, while the runway show took place around them.

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Haute couture is fashion at its most eye-wateringly expensive and extravagant – but, from mussing up your ponytail to reclaiming pink, some of the shows’ strongest styling tips can be adopted for free

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Apart from the dainty flats, Armani’s Privé couture show was a riot of pinks, velvet and serious glamour

Consider the Cannes ban on flats on the red carpet well and truly overruled. Giorgio Armani, master of red-carpet dressing, showed nothing else with his latest collection of evening wear. At Privé, the exclusive collection that Armani shows at Paris haute couture week, pointed and polished delicate flat mules were worn with velvet trousers, and luxe velvet smoking-room slippers with ball gowns.
The heels were the only down to earth thing about the show. This was power dressing for evening: show-stopping fabrications, striking silhouettes and bold colour. Styled with oversized neon earrings and short, spiky black wigs, it was hard-edged and striking rather than soft-focus princess pretty. Which is what this house does best. Don’t be fooled by the deconstructed tailoring: Armani is boss-dressing, at heart.

The newly humble designer was unashamedly provocative in a show that included shoes with circular blades, sackcloth and, surprisingly, three men

John Galliano is back to what he does best: shocking the fashion industry – in a good way.

At Galliano’s first Paris haute couture show since his time at Dior, three of the models were men. Haute couture does not include menswear and is the most traditional and rarified strata of fashion, still dominated by corseted shapes, exaggerated femininity and fantastical gowns. In this context, a man in heels and a dress is unashamedly provocative. All the more so since Galliano’s first couture show for Margiela earlier this year was shown off-schedule in London, making this Grand Palais event his official haute couture comeback.

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‘The vaguely boho suede jacket is making a bid to replace the leather bomber/biker as the mid-season, goes-with-anything layer’

Promise me you won’t buy a suede skirt in the sales. It’s for your own good. Don’t take this lightly: you will need to be strong, because a suede skirt sales purchase may seem like a good idea. You’ve seen lots of people wearing them, but have until now been put off by the fact that (a) the nice ones are pricey, and (b) it’s not something you usually wear, so you’re a bit nervous. And then you’re in the sales and suddenly suede skirts are half the price they were, so that objection is swept away, and you’ve seen so many you feel blase about how to wear them. And so you drop, say, £30 or £40 on one. Please don’t. Save your money for something more worthwhile. Like those pots of fresh fruit with a 500% mark-up for being cut into dinky slices and packaged in plastic, or lottery tickets, or Sunday morning yoga classes you know you’ll never actually get to. Seriously, any of the above represent better value for money than a suede skirt bought at this stage of the game.

I was joking about the lottery, though. You need to save your thrifty, skirt-avoiding pennies for a suede jacket, you see. The 70s trend is going precisely nowhere for autumn, and the vaguely boho suede jacket is making a bid to replace the leather bomber/biker as the mid-season, goes-with-anything layer. Suede skirts are easy to wear in summer but much harder come autumn – they look odd with tights, but can work well with a knee-high leather boot – whereas a boxy suede jacket with a collar works as well over a chunky polo neck in November as it does over a fine cotton vest in July.

‘Raf Simons takes the strapless dress – a style that recently seemed relevant only to weddings and proms – and turns it into something you’d totally want to wear out for dinner’

There is a scene in the excellent fashion documentary Dior & I when designer Raf Simons is shown the first draft of a dress he has tasked the atelier with producing. It has a classically shaped, strapless, boned corset. He frowns and points to the line above the bust. It is too low, too scooped, he says. It should be higher, straighter. You can sense the unspoken queries from his team. (Shouldn’t a bustier be feminine, revealing? Isn’t that the point?) But then you see the remade dress, with its higher, straighter neckline, and you know Simons is right. His new-look bustier isn’t classic, or romantic. By raising the top of the fabric, and discarding the traditional sweetheart curlicues in favour of a poker-straight line, he takes the strapless dress – a style that recently seemed relevant only to weddings and proms – and turns it into something you’d totally want to wear out for dinner, weather and Pilates-attendance permitting.

It’s a tiny adjustment, but it makes all the difference. (The style has since spread. The one I’m wearing, happily for the price tag, is not by Dior, but by Raey, the brilliant own-label bit of Matches.) I would never have worn a corset-style bustier on this page, but I’m happy to wear the straight kind, because the new version feels more chic and less vulnerable. There’s a shift in attitude disproportionate to the small amount of extra coverage. The fact that this bustier shape pretends your breasts somehow don’t exist makes the half-undressedness of the look less of an issue.

Ditch the high heels and cropped trousers, invest in a holiday skirt - and you can still never go wrong with black. Jess Cartner-Morley on the essential style updates for your 2015 summer-holiday wardrobe

Yes, really. Because the cut-off denim short is too entrenched to be dismissed as an aberration any longer, and once you stop fighting this, summer dressing becomes instantly easier. Like emojis and no-reservation restaurants, denim cut-offs may have seemed like a fly-by-night trend to begin with, but they have turned out to be a cornerstone of 21st-century life, so you might as well get with the programme. Especially as much holiday fashion is now designed around what works with them. Case in point: that boho, embroidered, kaftan-esque blouse you kept seeing everywhere that you tried on with a pair of trousers and looked plain frumpy. Not at all the glamorous minor-Delevingne-on-holiday look you had in mind. Try it again, with a pair of denim cut-offs. The key is to find a pair with a womanly, roomy cut – think Beyoncé, not Katy Perry – that covers your tummy button and all, repeat all, of your bottom.

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The Pixar film brings the voices in your head to life – and dresses them up, too. But who gets the fashion nod: kale-coloured Disgust, 50s nerd Anger or turtle-necked Sadness?

‘Most people get hot weather office dressing completely wrong. The problem is psychological: you don’t want to be in the office on a day like this, and it’s hard to dress well for somewhere you don’t want to be’

Sod’s law, number 338: the heatwave will come, not the week when you’ve booked a week’s holiday and rented a seaside cottage, but the week after that, when you’re back at work. And those days when you wake up to glorious sunshine and still have to go to work are really hard to dress for. But wearing the wrong thing will make them only worse, so it’s worth figuring out a workday heatwave gameplan.

With its illustrious roll call of photographers and models, from Kate Moss to Annie Leibovitz, Pirelli’s triumph is a masterclass in image management

It is an assignment that Kate Moss, who has appeared on the cover of British Vogue 36 times, described as “the best job ever”. Clive Arrowsmith, who has taken portraits of everyone from Michael Caine to the Dalai Lama, likened it to “a knighthood of photography”. Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue, and Steven Meisel, who has shot all but one Italian Vogue cover in two decades, recently called their involvement with the title “an honour”. Karl Lagerfeld, who was commissioned to shoot his “dear friend” Julianne Moore as the Greek goddess Hera, commented that “nobody believes in these gods any more, but [these] girls ... are the goddesses of today”.

It is impossible to dismiss the Pirelli calendar as an outmoded relic. If it was naff, it wouldn’t have worked

Whispers that Alexander Wang will leave Balenciaga have been circulating for months, and now Womenswear Daily are reporting that the French fashion house are already looking for a successor

In the control-freak world of high fashion, when a label allows a rumour to fly without squashing it, that’s almost as good as a confirmation.

Asked about persistent rumours that Alexander Wang’s next show for Balenciaga in early October will be his last, Kering’s chief financial officer told journalists only that “there are ongoing discussions and I won’t comment further”.

‘Riviera chic is the new version of Breton. It’s a little less utilitarian, a little more glamorous’

suppose that, technically speaking, Brittany is still in France, but the Breton top has jumped the shark as far as Frenchness is concerned, and is now what English people buy from Boden to wear when they are actually spending their holidays in Cornwall but want to look a little bit continental. This annoys the hell out of fashion types, who like to hold forth about how they’ve been wearing them since the days when you had to get to Saint-Malo market at dawn to buy them directly off the fishermen for two francs, etc.

Fashion, therefore, has had to venture a bit further south this year, to find a summer look with a touch more je ne sais quoi. Riviera chic is the new version of Breton. It’s a little bit less utilitarian, a little bit more glamorous.

Kim Kardashian’s beauty regimen is her life’s work, its secrets detailed in a live tutorial with her makeup artist last month. But from “baking” the eyes to her strict five day hair-washing programme, do her tips pay off in real life?

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Florals have a language all their own. From LBD-esque dark orchids to statement peonies, here’s our guide to harnessing your flower power

There are small but crucial differences between fashion and the real world. Here’s one: in fashion, flowers for the kitchen table are not something that you buy on impulse from the stall by the station as an it’s-Friday treat. They are as much of a style statement – and as trend-driven – as your handbag, or your shoes, or the car you drive, or the restaurant you book for your birthday party. They must be carefully considered and finely calibrated to enhance your personal brand.

The coolest trend in flowers over the past few years hasn’t, confusingly, involved flowers at all. Greenery is what greets you when you walk into Céline’s Mount Street store. The vogue for palm leaves can be traced back to Céline’s ad campaign for autumn/winter 2011; their cult status was confirmed in 2012 when House of Hackney launched its now-classic Palmeral print. A cheeseplant or succulent on your mid-century sideboard is pure minimalist cool, the lack of pretty petals chiming nicely with your on-trend androgynous wardrobe.

Loewe designer and head of his own label, Anderson has bold ambitions and a fierce competitive instinct forged during his youth in 1990s Northern Ireland. Here he talks alter egos, gender fluidity and Instagram

Because I am a little early, and in true Paris fashion week tradition the morning’s schedule is already running a little late, I spend the first half hour of my visit to Loewe’s Parisian headquarters in the basement kitchen. This being Paris fashion week, however, this is a little better than it sounds: long, scrubbed, pale wood benches and a table piled with bowls of kumquats and slivers of lemon cake on a white platter. Fuchsia peonies in a glass urn are so artfully overblown that, when no one is looking, I stroke a petal to check they are real. (They are.) A charming French PR chats to me about how much she loves living in Dalston. A pair of male models, in dressing gowns and with alligator clips flattening their hair ready for the artless dirty-hair-don’t-­care look they will sport at the collection presentation later, spend 10 painstaking minutes trying to figure out the espresso machine; eventually, generous in triumph, they pass tiny paper cups of coffee around the room.

From the ground floor, the building blooms into grandeur: a double sweeping staircase, parquet floor, polished curlicue railings. Loewe occupies the lowest four floors of the building; someone confides, as we walk upstairs, that the sixth floor houses Catherine Deneuve’s apartment. On the first floor, LVMH executives in elegant black suits are drinking more espressos, up here borne aloft by waiters with silver trays. We climb another level, past photographer’s assistants gaffer-taping lighting cabling to the floor and makeup artists powdering more boys, to the office of Jonathan Anderson, the 30-year-old designer from The Loup, County Derry, on whose talent LVMH is gambling the Loewe brand, the man at whose whim the parquet has been painted wenge-dark and the models’ hair creased flat.

‘The question mark over pink is no longer about whether real men can wear it; it’s about whether real women can’

The question mark over pink is no longer about whether real men can wear it; it’s about whether real women can. Being relaxed about gender norms is terrifically 2015, after all. A man in pink is smart and modern, as is a woman in a navy double-breasted jacket. Pink-for-little-girls is at best a cliche, at worst a societal evil to be campaigned against. Pink for big girls, meanwhile, suggests you are either immature (as in, a bit old to dress like Barbie) or out-of-date (as in, a bit young to dress like the Queen Mother).

Fashion has dodged this question by whitewashing pink to a rosy neutral and rebranding it “blush”. Blush has become the acceptable face of pink, a pink to save your blushes. If bright pink is the commercialised, commodified colour of femininity – think of Marilyn Monroe singing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend in her high-shine fuchsia frock – then a dusty, plaster-of-Paris off-pink is the acceptable arthouse alternative.

Fashion has embraced technology but it still loves a pencil. And a posh notebook, a sharpie and embossed notecards. Inspired by Tom Ford and her school filofax, Jess Cartner-Morley on her stationery obsession

It began, as character-defining crushes so often do, on French exchange. I was 13, immersed in Frenchness for the first time, and it was fabulous. First because each morning for breakfast we were given a bowl of hot chocolate and a stack of creamy, scallop-edged biscuits to dip into it. But also because of the stationery. I fell madly, deeply in love with the school exercise books, which were A5-sized, sewn-spined, the pages chequered with a faint quadrille. So elegant, so precise, so chic. WHSmith’s spiral-bound lined notebooks were dead to me from that day onward, and a lifelong love affair was born.

Stationery is more emotional than fashion, notebooks and diaries more intimate than your knicker drawer. I can measure out my life in paper, from those flimsy notebooks to the ludicrously expensive Smythson ones I use now. My teenage diaries are even now redolent with the pointless intensity of childhood secrets. The Filofax and Mont Blanc fountain pen I had as a sixth former are unthrowable still, despite or perhaps because of the painfully earnest copied-out quotes and in-jokes scrawled in the margins. I have a treasured folder filled with notepaper from every swanky hotel I have ever stayed in: the Savoy in Florence, with its tiny terracotta duomo motif; Claridge’s, where we stayed on my husband’s 40th. And I have the giveaway organisational safety harnesses of every overwrought modern professional. (Current obsession: the Leuchtturm 1917 pencil loops, fixed in the back of every notebook and diary to save precious seconds on endlessly updating my to-do lists.)