This is how fashion’s A-star students virtuoso-signal their brilliance

Quite like Fab ice lollies; never thought I’d want to dress like one. Well, never say never. Fashion keeps on pushing the colour envelope, and two colours together is no longer enough. Tricolore dressing is the new frontier.

Fashion’s return to technicolour after decades when it was essentially a bit naff to wear anything that wasn’t black is a trickledown from the street-style peacocks who use colourful dressing as a way to get noticed. The erosion of the status of black began when it started to be outranked by navy, and went mass when Kim Kardashian underwent a style makeunder which involved wearing grey or beige head to toe. (A full house of Trump red has been on a few catwalks recently, so we will have to deal with that at some point. Consider yourself warned.)

Related: What I wore this week: a tomboy dress

Derbyshire estate stakes its claim to be the most fashionable house in England with a show spanning five centuries of design and decadence

Eggs from Chatsworth House’s famed chickens were immortalised in oils by Lucian Freud. (Four Eggs on a Plate sold at Sothebys for £989,000 in 2015.) Now a new exhibition, which opens at the house on Saturday, lays claim to another title for Chatsworth: that of the most fashionable house in England.

“This is the most rock’n’roll place I have ever been,” said Alessandro Michele, designer of Gucci, taking his place as guest of honour at a lunch in the Chatsworth sculpture gallery.

Related: Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, the last Mitford sister, dies aged 94

Related: Fashion shows find their match in historic settings

If you hadn’t noticed that there is a new power hairstyle on the scene, don’t feel bad about it. You weren’t supposed to notice because the new look flies deliberately under-the-radar. The check-me-out blow-out is over, and the new look is Don’t Care Good Hair.

Don’t Care Good Hair is flat at the top – root lift is so noughties, babes – and wavy through the middle section, but in a bendy, haphazard-looking shape with no spiral curls. The ends are left natural so they poke in different directions rather than being curled neatly under. It is more zigzag than Wag, more lo-fi than blow-dry.

A ribbed sock and a chunky sandal has been a niche fashion-nerd trend for a while. Now it’s gone mass

Hey, don’t let the photo put you off. Hear me out. Socks as a fashion statement are a trend, but you don’t have to go quite as far as I have done, and wear sport socks in public. In real life, I would be wearing plain ribbed socks, or possibly fishnet or lace ones if I was feeling particularly jazzy. But in a photo on this page you’d hardly notice those; it would look as if I had written my 345th love letter to the ankle boot. So here I am, in a sport sock. Made you look, right?

Almost everything in fashion is a comeback, but I’m not sure that socks have ever had a moment before. The associations of socks are all vaguely loser-ish. Smelly socks, lost socks, novelty socks. Keeping your socks on in bed. Socks are not public-facing clothes, but neither do they have the thrill of a stocking. Hosiery can be a status symbol – silk stockings as a symbol of rationing-defying luxury; the late-20th-century obsession with expensive velveteen opaques – but until recently the only chic way to wear socks was as an invisible layer under trousers long enough to cover them.

Related: What I wore this week: the wide-leg trouser | Jess Cartner-Morley

Social media stars are wielding increasing power in the fashion industry. What happens when Jess Cartner-Morley trades places with ‘influencer’ Doina Ciobanu?

The front row is a world divided. Montagues and Capulets, in bare legs rather than doublet and hose. Between the two blocs – editors on the one hand, “influencers” on the other – there is little love lost. Last autumn, American Vogue staffers branded the influencers “pathetic”, describing the job as “turning up, looking ridiculous, posing, twitching in your seat as you check your social media feeds”. The influencers hit back, branding their Vogue attackers as haughty and out of touch. (“Get back to your Werther’s Originals,” was a particularly choice comeback.) We think they are airheads; they think we are fogeys. So, to find out who’s right, I have arranged a job swap at London fashion week. Doina Ciobanu is 22, has 225,000 followers on Instagram (at time of writing), and attends shows as a model, VIP guest and brand ambassador. Ciobanu grew up in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, where she began blogging aged 16. She moved to Bucharest at 19, and now lives in London. For Saturday at London Fashion Week, I will do her job and she will do mine.

My job is to write about the shows. Writing to deadline frames my days and everything else – designer interviews, checking out up-and-comers, analysing emerging trends – has to fit around that. Doina’s job is to provide online content, mostly self-portraits with fairly brief captions, some of which are arranged in collaboration with labels whose clothes or beauty products she wears in the photos. I am an expert; Doina is an avatar.

Being Doina is a complex business. Brands pay her. An agent negotiates fees

Her social media isn’t a logbook of her life, it’s a brand-strategy document

Doina is much better at my job than I am at hers

I wrote the review on my phone, while walking down the street between shows. It was stressful

The designer has collaborated with Target. Here we choose the items to snap up, from bunny dresses for the Harper in your life to plus sized pieces and signature wide-legged trousers

You know a designer’s made it when they are confident enough in their fashion credentials to produce a diffusion range for the high street. So it is with Victoria Beckham, whose range for Target goes on sale on Sunday 9 April on her website for buyers in the UK and throughout Target stores in the US. Here’s our pick of the best items to snap up.

If your work shirt isn’t raising a few eyebrows, it isn’t working hard enough

A blue-and-white striped cotton shirt is as potent as the smell of black coffee. Crisp cotton in sky blue striped with fluffy cloud white has a can-do, today-is-a-new-day energy which is just what you need to power up your morning.

But this spring’s shirts take this to the next level. That’s why they call them elevated shirts. These season’s shirts are supershirts. They take that morning coffee freshness and spritz it with a little Tom Ford Black Orchid va-va-voom. Frankly, if your work shirt isn’t raising a few eyebrows, it isn’t working hard enough.

Related: Women's shirts reimagined – in pictures

When the first daughter wore an odd pair of earrings this week, she wasn’t trying to look on-trend – she was trying to make us think she was one of us

Just when you’re thinking geopolitics can’t actually can’t get any more hostile to progressive values, Ivanka Trump weaponises the mismatched earring. Is nothing sacred? What next, Steve Bannon in a Cos long-sleeved T-shirt and Adidas Gazelles? Kellyanne Conway arriving for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago with a Daunts Bookshop tote bag?

This skirt is the bottom-half equivalent of the silk shirt, in that it elevates separates into something with a bit more status

The most important labels on clothes are not the stitched-in ones, but the ones in your head. The Party Dress that has the power to propel you out of sensible I-should-really-get-an-early-night doldrums and on to the dance floor. The Smart Jacket which straightens your spine and stiffens your resolve. The Holiday Sandals that serve as a Post-it note reminder to get a move on and book that pedicure.

The Social Skirt was a new one on me until a few weeks back. It came to yours truly via LK Bennett, who has christened a new category of summer fashion. The Social Skirt is the bottom-half equivalent of the silk shirt, in that it elevates separates into something with a bit more status. Separates tend to be the taken for granted bit of our wardrobes. They just sort of rub along together in the belly of your wardrobe. You know which jeans you want to wear and so you pull out a top to make up the numbers.

Related: What I wore this week: three colours together | Jess Cartner-Morley

Last night the professionally glamorous interpreted the most challenging dress code: avant garde, inspired by Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons – and some handled it better than others

The Met Gala, opening party for the Metropolitan Museum’s annual fashion exhibition, is always described as either the Super Bowl or the Oscars of fashion. Deadly competition garlanded in hoopla, and you’d better be seeing a lot of the gym in the run-up. But this year’s event, held last night in New York, was more like the Hodge conjecture of frocks, or the Riemann hypothesis of style. Having surmounted the first challenge by making the cut for a tight guest list controlled by Anna Wintour, attendees had to grapple with an intractable puzzle: how to pay homage to this year’s honoured designer, the cult Japanese avant-gardist Rei Kawakubo, while bringing requisite glamour for the starriest night of the fashion calendar.

Related: Met Gala 2017: avant garde looks on the red carpet – in pictures

Engineering the perfect red-carpet arrival is no longer enough to truly win at this annual ball – but guests have found plenty more audacious ways to pull rank

The celebrity-packed squad goals selfie is the Vanity Fair gatefold cover for the social media age. It is quite possible that cut-throat LA publicists spent the weekend negotiating their clients’ exact placement in this image, taken by Kylie Jenner and posted on Instagram. Timing your entrance and perfecting your duck face to engineer the traditional red-carpet arrival moment is no longer enough.

There will be many summer days when a high neck and bare arms are as appropriate a reaction to the weather as a cotton shirt

It’s hard to look sophisticated in summer. This seems ridiculous, in a country where summer isn’t even actually hot very often. Nonetheless, fact. Case in point: a T-shirt. It is tricky to make a T-shirt look more than basic. The woman in my mind’s eye, as I put on a T-shirt on a summer day, is Jane Birkin. Maybe she’s wearing the T-shirt with plimsolls and a little skirt. She’s got a newspaper in her straw basket as she takes a stroll for a cafe creme. But in reality, if I put on a T-shirt, I look as if I’ve been sent into the garden to play.

A polo neck might seem a drastic solution to this conundrum, and clearly isn’t going to be your first port of call in a heatwave. Being red-faced and sweaty, tugging at the neckline of your sweater like a frantic dog on a lead, is hardly going to help us reach that elusive state of sun-dappled grace. But there will be many summer days when a high neck and bare arms are as appropriate a reaction to the weather forecast as a cotton shirt.

Related: What I wore this week: socks as a fashion statement

The Japanese fashion designer has had a huge influence on what we wear ever since the late 1970s – and this week she became the first living designer to be given a solo show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum for 34 years

The morning after Monday’s gala launch of the Metropolitan Museum’s new fashion exhibition, the internet was awash with images of partygoers. Rihanna in latticed thigh-high boots, Madonna in cocktail camo print, Katie Perry veiled in blood red. However, it took a painstaking search to unearth just one photograph taken on the night of the woman for whom the party was held. Eventually, on the third slide of a New York Times party gallery – after Kendall Jenner, before Jourdan Dunn – I found a single image of Rei Kawakubo, the subject of the exhibition and guest of honour at the party. Kawakubo is wearing a white leather biker jacket zipped close over a white shirt buttoned to the throat, and stares unsmiling at the camera through black sunglasses.

To be the life and soul of a party is not Kawakubo’s style. Intense, deep and serious are her brand values. I had been promised that she would describe the experience of opening night to me, and true to her word, she sent me the following by email. “I WAS VERY CURIOUS TO SEE THE MET GALA AND HAD AN INTERESTING TIME. AND I WAS HAPPY TO SEE SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE SPACE SPENDING THEIR TIME EXPLORING.” The fact that she is the first living designer to be honoured with a monographic show at the Met since the one staged for Yves Saint Laurent 34 years ago is testament to her significance in the industry. Other recent Met shows have paid homage to fashion’s late, lamented greats: Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen and Gianni Versace. Kawakubo joining that elite list suggests she might be the closest thing fashion hasto a living saint.

Related: Met Gala 2017: who nailed the trickiest dress code ever?

She’s not a ‘trophy wife’, and she’s not a ‘school-run mum’. Does Brigitte Macron’s style signal a new era for the political wife?

Leaving her home in Le Touquet to cast her ballot in the French presidential elections on Sunday morning, Brigitte Macron wore a sleek Louis Vuitton navy coat, with a face-flattering flash of silver leather in the raised biker-styled collar. She was still wearing the coat that evening, by which time she was the country’s first lady elect, raising hands in triumph on stage with her husband, Emmanuel Macron.

Ours is a visual culture. When we get dressed, we take a position. Brigitte Macron, who has a longstanding personal interest in fashion and has been a Paris front row regular for years, knows this very well indeed; that coat was a deliberate choice, and an interesting one for several reasons. First, the biker-style collar made it a subtly rebellious look where, traditionally, political wives choose for election day dutiful, church-on-Sunday coats or dull, senior-management-meeting ensembles. Second, Macron has worn this coat many times before, including – with leather trousers, that time – to Paris fashion week in March last year, so the choice emphasises Macron’s own taste (this is from her wardrobe, not by order of an image consultant) and industry connections. Third, the coat is by Louis Vuitton, France’s biggest luxury brand, and reinforces her husband’s message of a progressive administration comfortable with big business.

The new issue of Vogue has landed on the fashion desk – and with it, a first look at Alexa Chung’s new label. Here’s our snap verdict

Fashion has a million so-called influencers, but only one Alexa Chung. She put a generation of millennials in Peter Pan collars, brought the Barbour jacket back from the dead to backstage at Glastonbury, and is the reason why you have so many pairs of ankle boots. So her Alexachung collection, which goes on sale 31 May, is going to hit your wardrobe hard. Here are our predictions for the three ways in which Alexa will impact your summer 2017 look, based on close scrutiny of her Vogue reveal.

A ragged, all-over-the-place hem brings a topical note of chaos to your look

That thing about hemlines reflecting economic fortunes: do you remember? When times are good, skirt hems rise along with the stock market. In a depression, the fabric plunges to the floor. It seemed to hold for most of the 20th century, but in the first part of the 21st (along with opinion polls, and what happened last time, and what the people who know about stuff say, and all those other now irrelevant ways of predicting world events) it became unreliable. As the trend cycle sped up, fabric rose and fell at a rate too dizzying to be pegged to anything in the real world.

But in 2017, we have a definitive hemline. And guess what? It’s all over the place. It’s not long, and it’s not short. It zigzags up and down. It is the hemline for uncertain times, the perfect look for an era in which backlashes and upsets have replaced constancy or steady progress. It can take the shape of a conventional skirt slashed vertically to ribbons, or it can be a variation on the mullet hem, longer at the back and shorter in front. In its most classic form – the hankie hem – pointed corners of fabric are stitched together so as to dangle unevenly around your shins.

Related: What I wore this week: elevated shirts | Jess Cartner-Morley

Fashion house holds show at Miho Museum, continuing trend of powerhouse brands staging events in far-flung settings

The Miho Museum in Japan is 9,628km from its Paris headquarters, but Louis Vuitton was founded to make expensive luggage, and glamorous globetrotting is very much the point.

The vogue among powerhouse brands for staging elaborate catwalk events showcasing their cruise collections continued this weekend with Louis Vuitton’s show at the museum, as famed for its spectacular setting in the Shigaraki mountains as for its collection of Japanese antiquities.

Marks & Spencer’s beleaguered clothing department previews chic autumn collection up to speed with catwalk trends

Will knickers or canapes win the battle for the soul of Marks & Spencer, or can the pink coats fight off a landgrab by prawn sandwiches to remain at the heart of the country’s most iconic high street store?

Recent trophy boardroom appointments and a new marketing campaign have contrasted with imminent store closures, and whisperings of further disappointing sales figures on the horizon as the brand continues to shift its focus from clothes to food.

How I have made it this far without a wide-legged pair in pale velvet as part of my pink-trouser repertoire?

If white jeans are everyone’s favourite summer guilty pleasure, pink trousers are the new white jeans. White jeans are a day-off treat, slightly naff, but totally delicious, like syrupy high-street iced coffee. White jeans are for women – and men – who guard their downtime ferociously, laugh in the face of chores and spend Saturdays doing nonessential shopping or monopolising the sunniest table at the cafe for leisurely catchups. A pair of white jeans says, “I am on my own time today, thank you very much, and I shall do as I please.”

But, like oversized sunglasses and wedge sandals, white jeans are easy to mock as an entry-level lifestyle accessory. They lack irony or edge. And this is where pink trousers come in, because pink trousers confuse people. I like them for this reason. Those who roll their eyes at white jeans are less sure of their ground when faced with pink trousers. They are pink, which is a silly, jolly kind of a colour, but they are also trousers, which are what sensible grownups wear to work. So pink trousers become more compelling than a pink dress.

Related: What I wore this week: a polo neck for summer

It is milder than McQueen, but there are monsters, ghosts and glamour in the museum’s account of a fashion giant

The first dress visitors to Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion will see, when the exhibition opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum on 27 May, is a lurid pea-green silk gown made in 1962. Hot-air balloon puffs of volume render the figure beneath irrelevant, and the dress stands with its back turned haughtily on the viewer.

“We chose that dress to set the scene, precisely because it’s so odd,” the curator Cassie Davies-Strodder explained during a preview of the exhibition in the final stages of installation. “Balenciaga is about the kind of beauty which has a weirdness about it.”