Choosing edgy designer Giles Deacon to create traditional gown results in elegant but unconventional bridal look

• Pippa Middleton marries James Matthews
  

The Middleton sisters have established an effective formula in choosing wedding dresses. Select an edgy designer, and commission them to create a fairly traditional gown. It works a treat, resulting in a bridal look which is elegant without being conventional, high taste but not too avant garde.

Related: Giles Deacon: the down-to-earth northerner who has stormed the heights of Paris couture

Last year’s big look, the Bardot ruffle, is about to be usurped by city kaftans, fancy sleeves and baring one shoulder like a star at Cannes

The dress season has officially begun. Nothing to do with Pippa’s wedding or Ascot or Henley. In truly 21st-century style, we know this from the fountain of ultimate truth that is your Google search history: May is the month in which online searches for “dress” peak. In contrast to the Munchian hell that is buying new swimwear, summer dress shopping is pure sunshine. Minimal strap-tangling and no need for clammy changing room nudity. Which is lucky, because every summer has a new key dress style, so update last year’s Bardot ruffles with one of 2017’s dresses to know.

Functioning sleeves, a soft silhouette and definitely no shoulder pads... welcome to shoulder-robing without the drama

The big news this week is that I’ve finally cracked shoulder-robing. I don’t mean I’ve mastered how to do it (still struggling with how not to crick my neck, drop the jacket in a puddle, or both), but I’ve figured out what it means. Shoulder-robing is to the serious jacket what a rolled sleeve is to the crisp, white shirt. It is power dressing for an age obsessed with soft power.

And we really, really are obsessed with soft power. This is a relatively new phenomenon, and a shift that permeates everything. It is why first ladies are 21st-century megastars – the role itself is the quintessence of soft power. It is why we are less interested in what Taylor Swift wears on stage than what she wears at the airport. It is why it is more alpha to be wearing leggings and trainers at noon on a Saturday than it is high heels. It is why the middle name you give your baby is more of a status symbol than the make of your car these days.

Related: What I wore this week: the zigzag hemline

The 2017 take on this shoulder-revealing look is my favourite so far

The cold-shoulder top is the summer trend that point-blank refuses to die. The world has been in geopolitical turmoil for a whole year, yet this shoulder-revealing top has not faltered for one moment in its quest for domination. Frilly, milkmaid-ish, white lace versions commanded last year’s holiday wardrobes; sultry, slinky ones monopolised Christmas party wear.

The 2017 update is the spec I like the best so far: this summer’s version is a crisp shirt with shoulders exposed. This is progress, because until now daytime iterations of the look have flirted with a bucolic, daisy-chain vibe which, while adorable, is wearable only on the one Saturday in the year when it’s your goddaughter’s first birthday party in the park. And even then it works only if it’s hot and sunny, because most cold-shoulder tops are hopelessly uncomfortable if you wear a jacket on top.

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

As her fashion label launches, Alexa Chung recreates the looks of her favourite style icons

You would really like Alexa Chung. She’s famous for having loads of celebrity mates and an It hairstyle and wearing quirky clothes, which perhaps doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, but you would. The celebrity mates and the hair and the quirky clothes are all part of her, but she is also the kind of woman who, when she puts on a black leather minidress that shows ridiculously long, slender legs, starts pointing out to me and the other women around her on Guardian Weekend’s shoot how dry and hairy those legs are. (They’re not, but still.) When she tells a funny story about the time she and Pixie Geldof got locked out on a smoking terrace at a party and Taylor Swift rescued them, she somehow makes herself the butt of the joke: the loser who wasn’t famous enough for the bouncers to bother rescuing. She totally gets that us normals find the Alexa Chungs of the world a bit annoying, and goes out of her way not to be.

The in-demand face of Gap and Versace is changing the rules of how to make it big in fashion. She talks about authenticity, her depression – and why her shaved head was a two fingers to the industry

Adwoa Aboah is ridiculously beautiful, but that is not what makes her the most in-demand model of the moment. Sure, the razor-sharp cheekbones and the blown-glass lips don’t do her prospects any harm. But there is something in her gaze to camera that makes her beauty seem as if it’s not the most compelling thing about her. It is this that has raised Aboah – face of a new Gap campaign, muse to Donatella Versace, booked for the catwalk by everyone from Christian Dior and Chanel to Marc Jacobs and Alexander Wang – above the modelling rank and file.

My first appointment with Aboah is cancelled because she hasn’t yet got out of bed. So far, so supermodel. But when we finally speak, it becomes clear that this Linda Evangelista moment is about as far as Aboah goes in terms of conformity to the modelling tradition of aloof, enigmatic beauty. After our interview, she has a busy day ahead. First, a meeting with Dr Lauren Hazzouri, a psychologist specialising in young women’s mental health. After that, it’s off to Gurls Talk, the online platform she founded to enable discussion about mental health, body image and sexuality, to plan an upcoming event. Forget castings and go-sees: Aboah is changing the rules of how a modern model makes it big.

Pull the look off, and pastels become strangely powerful

There’s a reason they don’t make traffic lights in pastel colours. Primary colours are show-stoppers; pastels suggest serenity. A pretty sunrise or a boulangerie window are balm for your eyes, but can be ignored if you’re too busy.

This absence of urgency can be problematic when you wear pastels. The reason bridesmaids traditionally wear them is that in lemon yellow or mint green or baby blue, a pretty girl adds to the decorative picture without stealing the show. (No coincidence that the age of the grown-up, maid-of-honour bridesmaid has ushered in a trend for white, black and red dresses.) By pastel, I mean light versions of an actual colour. Pale neutrals are quite different: a nude or blush or toffee shade suggests skin, which suggests sex, whereas a watered-down blue, pink or green evokes nothing saucier than a single-bed duvet cover.

Related: What I wore this week: a cold-shoulder shirt

As his eponymous exhibition opens in Calais, the 90-year-old fashion legend recalls career-defining friendships with Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy

A retrospective exhibition self-curated by a 90-year-old legend of fashion has all the hallmarks of an ego-flaunting vanity project. But Hubert de Givenchy, who attended the opening of his self-titled show at the Calais Museum for Lace and Fashion on Thursday, has more class than that.

The stars of this exhibition are not the couturier himself, but some of the women whose public personas he helped create, including Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy and the Duchess of Windsor.

A pair of trousers that promises to make your midsection look like a bulging grocery sack of apples: I mean, at least you can’t accuse it of luring you in with false hope

Deep down, the trousers I truly love are the really boring ones. If I could save only two pairs of trousers from my wardrobe, I know exactly which ones they would be. A navy pair from Vanessa Bruno and a black pair by Gap. Both getting on for a decade old now. I know that if I am stuck for time or inspiration either of these will work, with white T-shirt and trainers or with a silk shirt and heels.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to be more adventurous, it’s just that it seldom works out. Palazzo-width trousers, for instance, always look a bit alternative therapy practitioner on me, when the look I was going for was more Venice Biennale.

Related: What I wore this week: soft jackets | Jess Cartner-Morley

I am on a road trip, somewhere hot and dry. Arizona, maybe, or Texas. I stop the car, open the door into the breeze and, while the cicadas play drums to the song on the radio, the roadside scents of grass and hot asphalt and petrol hit me full in the face. I can smell adventure.

I have never been to Arizona, or to Texas. It is 30C in London, and today’s adventures do not extend beyond the Victoria line. In real life, I am in one of the 10 installations in the new Somerset House exhibition Perfume: A Sensory Journey Through Contemporary Scent. Five minutes ago, in another room, I was picking up the smell that lingers on a sweater the morning after a campfire, along with all the anti-rat-race, acoustic-guitar baggage that goes with that. In another space, I close my eyes and it is as if I had stepped inside a quiet Mediterranean church on a July day: I can smell the wood polish, the dried flowers, but also, somehow, the cool of the stone, the soft clunk of the door closing the deep-pile hush that builds over centuries of whispers.

Fashion brands compete for the co-ed badge this summer dressing men in puffy gowns and blouses for the catwalk

Fashion reflects the times we live in, said Coco Chanel, and the Exeter schoolboys and the French bus drivers prove her right. We are more relaxed about gender rules, these days. A century after women started wearing trousers and 19 years after David Beckham was ridiculed for wearing a sarong, the last taboo of fashion – men in skirts – is being swept away.

Zara has capitalised on the market for clothes that can be worn by men or women, offering a gender-neutral fashion range. And the further up the fashion food chain you go, the more the boundaries between menswear and womenswear evaporate.

If you’re a jeans-wearer, I promise you will find it useful

A few places where I’ve seen khaki utility jackets recently: on Kate Moss, teamed with black jeans and a leopardprint scarf, spotted out and about in Highgate. On a beach in Ibiza one afternoon when it got chilly and the woman whose lovely soft linen tiered maxi beach dress I had been admiring (didn’t get close enough to sneak a peek at the label, I’m afraid. Kalita, maybe? Lisa Marie Fernandez? Not cheap, anyway) pulled one out of her monogrammed raffia beach tote. On the Valentino resort catwalk in New York, embroidered and worn over a white shirt dress. Oh, and last but not least, on me: this Topshop feathered number has been my go-to spring/summer jacket for two months.

Kate Moss, Ibiza, Valentino, feathers. Join the dots: the khaki shirt-jacket isn’t a dowdy utility jacket any more. A jacket that was once camouflage, and therefore deliberately drab, has become a look-at-me item. This makes it perfect for Glastonbury, where clothes whose practical surface belies a thinly disguised vanity are what style is all about. (See the backstage-battered Barbour jacket, the surprisingly flattering cut of Hunter wellies when worn with cut-offs.)

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

Never bring more than one pair of high heels and remember wire hangers are your friends … here are Jess Cartner-Morley’s hardcore tips for holiday packing, plus five summer essentials

In the art of packing, as so often in life, you learn through your mistakes. And I have made a few. My career to date has been an extended, fully immersive practical and rigorous examination in the art of the suitcase. I’m talking high-stakes, PhD-level packing. The kind of packing that will see you right when New York fashion week outfits need to contend with blizzards (par for the course in February) or hurricanes (commonplace in September). The kind that won’t let you down when you get an unexpected call in your Milan hotel room to say that Donatella Versace is hosting Jennifer Lopez’s wedding, and do you want to come to Lake Como, like, now? In the course of a decade and a half in fashion, the two practical life skills I have notched up are, first, being able to assemble a filling and balanced meal representative of all the major food groups from a tray of canapes, even while that tray is moving; second, how to pack.

This is the eveningwear top for an era when the rules of how much flesh to show are all over the place

Wonky clothes aren’t sexy clothes. An hourglass dress, a sweetheart neckline, a plunging V-neck: this is how sexy works. The rules of attraction are fundamentally simple, ancient and unchanging, and asymmetry cuts right across them.

Which is exactly why, when you do put nakedness and asymmetry together, things get interesting. It’s a subversive, unsettling combination. It is why Bianca Jagger in a draped, scarlet one-shoulder Halston dress– the asymmetry accentuated by a white fox fur draped over one shoulder, and a large drink in the other hand – is the quintessential image of Studio 54, a place that was all about sex and, at the same time, about so much more besides.

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

They say you should dress for the job you want, not the one you have. Many women seem to apply this approach to dressing for the whole of the summer season. In other words, we dress for the summer we want, rather than the one we are actually having. The woman in front of me in the queue for my 8am coffee, who had her protein pot held in the crook of her arm in order to jab non-stop on her phone during the transaction, was wearing a dreamy, rustic-linen midi dress with strawberries and leaves around the hem and bell-shaped sleeves. Behind me, a twentysomething ordering a matcha latte dug her debit card out of a cute heart-shaped raffia basket that held a water bottle from Barry’s Bootcamp, the cult fitness class.

This is about more than just wanting to be on holiday and having to go to the office instead. This is about what kind of a summer you are dreaming of, as you gaze out of the office window. It is about aspiring to a specifically pastoral aesthetic of meadows and picnics and daisy chains. To rockpools, not infinity pools; peace and quiet, not beach parties. It is poetic rather than high-rolling; more slow motion than jet set. It is a folk dress with a rope belt rather than Daisy Duke shorts. It is keeping your hair off your face with a fishtail braid rather than slicked back behind designer shades. It is a ribbon-tie espadrille rather than a sporty flip flop.

Take your cue from a very British icon and hunt down those subtle squares

I believe we may have reached peak gingham. I really like it, but I think I am over it. Over having meetings with grown women who seem to be dressed as Dorothy. Over being on the same tube carriage as two other women in the same Bonne Maman jam jar lid red-and-white check Zara skirt.

So, what to wear instead? With hindsight, we may have been rash to ditch the Breton stripe, as we did last summer in a fit of Brexit-tinged, fist-shaking-across-the-Channel stroppiness. I can’t for the life of me now recall the logic behind cutting our ties with this symbol of a civilised, progressive, cultured, cross-border lifestyle. But never mind: the people have spoken, we are where we are, and we have to make the best of it. Bretxit means Bretxit.

Related: What I wore this week: a khaki utility jacket

Two decades have passed since the designer’s murder. From embracing celebrity power to challenging sartorial snobbery, it is clear he was ahead of his time

Gianni Versace changed fashion. Plenty of designers change fashion – a gamechanging hemline here, a much-copied dress there – but not like him. Versace transformed what fashion meant. He put fashion in the middle of a new celebrity solar system and clothes at the centre of popular culture. This change was already in the air 20 years ago, on the July morning when the 50-year-old designer was shot. But it was his murder that jolted the world into recognising how potent the name Versace had become.

For some it’s kaftans, for others straw hats, and painted toenails are apparently mandatory. Guardian journalists explain their rules for summer dressing

Perhaps the very last time I gave even the most fleeting thought to beachwear was exactly 10 years ago, during a family summer holiday to France. We weren’t on the beach but in a municipal pool, for an afternoon of splashing around with my two kids, then aged six and three.

The catwalk has recently favoured outrage over allure. But now, whether it’s the Duchess of Cambridge’s vertiginous Pradas or Rihanna’s beloved rhinestone Saint Laurent boots, high heels are back

The Duchess of Cambridge has new shoes. On the offchance that it is not immediately obvious to you why this development is culturally significant, allow me to explain. The duchess’s style is remarkably consistent: for as long as anyone can remember, she has worn pretty clothes in eyecatching colours, teamed with neutral pumps, the heels of which are high enough to look formal while remaining walkable. LK Bennett Sledge courts, which have a subtle platform sole to make them more comfortable, are a favourite. Yet, for the unveiling of the blue whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum, she wore a daringly bare, vertiginous pair of Prada sandals.

Now, the duchess is no early adopter. Conservative with a small c, she stuck with those nude pumps three years after everyone else was bored to tears with them. So, if even she is wearing a sexy shoe, the sexy shoe is the new status quo. The ultimate It shoe of the upcoming season makes the duchess’s Prada sandal look like something you might slip on to buy a pint of milk. Saint Laurent’s rhinestone slouch boots were a phenomenon from the moment they hit the Paris catwalk. Within days, Rihanna had Instagrammed herself in a pair with the one-word caption “obsessed”. Customers were ringing stores demanding to know when there would be a waiting list to join. Net-a-Porter has spent more on the boot than on any other item this season; and months before they were visible on the site, half had been sold to VIP customers. Oh, by the way – should any appear on the open market – the price tag is £6,000.

A basket bag has adorned the arms of pouting French girls for decades. And it’s the cute way to channel this summer’s pastoral chic

So the good news is that you get to carry a Birkin bag this summer, although the bad news is that it’s not the Hermès version. Thirty-five years after going on sale, the designer It classic that Jane Birkin inspired is still out of the reach of most, what with the £6,750 price tag and a waiting list to boot. (To be fair, though, the resale value makes the bag a better investment than stocks or gold, but still.)

But there is another bag that is just as quintessentially Birkin as the Birkin, and this one is being piled high and sold cheap on the British high street this summer. The basket bag has been a key part of cool-French-girl summer style ever since Birkin was floating around the south of France barefoot in a pair of high-waisted jeans while dangling a basket over one arm – but it is having its most high-profile moment in ages right now. In a season where pastoral chic has trumped poolside glamour as summer’s key dress code, the basket bag brings your look instantly up to date.

Related: What I wore this week: a khaki utility jacket