Having the mass consumer in his sights with H&M has not prompted a dumbing down from the London-based designer

The make-or-break date of the autumn for Erdem Moralioğlu does not fall during fashion week. That is set for 2 November when his collaboration with H&M goes on sale. A hit on the high street will boost the profile and brand awareness of Erdem, as his label is known, more than any catwalk show ever could.

But Monday’s catwalk show was nonetheless significant for the young London-based designer. It offered a moment for the industry to assess Erdem’s form as Moralioğlu approaches the biggest hurdle of his career so far, and it was a test he passed with flying colours.

Royal Doulton china, kebab boxes and supermarket carrier bags are this season’s references on the London catwalks. What does this new down-to-earth vibe mean for our real-life wardrobes next spring?

A few snapshots from this London fashion week. Christopher Kane backstage after his show talking about the smell of bleach in his house that accompanies having a new French bulldog puppy, and the frills of the Royal Doulton figurines that his mum used to polish obsessively when he was growing up in Glasgow. Cindy Crawford’s model children, Kaia and Presley Gerber, catwalking at Burberry in check caps past a photography exhibit that included Martin Parr’s 1981 shot of Dubliners hunched under flimsy umbrellas as they battle rush-hour rain. (As an image of fashion in the rain, that shot is about as far from the romantic iconography of the raindrop-dappled, collar-popped Burberry trench as it is possible to imagine.) Plasticky bucket hats at Donatella Versace’s Versus show. The deadpan tones of Neil Tennant singing Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls, a song that emerged as the unexpected theme tune for the season when it opened both the Burberry and Topshop shows. A skirt and a top made from rough linen tea towels at JW Anderson, frilly cushion-handbags at Mother of Pearl, a silver clutch bag moulded from the shape of a polystyrene kebab box at Anya Hindmarch. Designer Richard Malone cheerfully naming the bright colour palette of his dresses as a homage to supermarket carrier bags: Tesco blue, Co-op turquoise.

This is street style, but not as fashion usually knows it. This is not the peacocking Insta-bait that has become the default uniform of London fashion week, all thousand-pound tracksuits and limited-edition bumbags. This is street as in ground-level, not street in the sense of being the coolest kids on the block. Actual real life, not a performative version of it. And this is different. Because from its beginnings as a breath-of-fresh-air backlash against the stuffiness of the catwalk, the street-style arm of fashion has over the past few years calcified into a bloodless beauty contest driven by cold, hard cash. One survey released on the eve of fashion week estimated that micro-influencers – those with about 10,000 social media followers – can command a fee of £3,000 a post, with many of these posts clustered around the venues and hashtags of fashion week.

Creative director Alessandro Michele draws on the glam rock star’s stagewear in avant-garde collection that defies convention

Heidegger’s thoughts on authenticity, Camus’ writings on the nature of rebellion, 17th-century cartography and the stage wear of Elton John – the catwalk show that opened Milan fashion week did not follow a formula smacking of obvious commercial success. But this is Gucci, where the designer Alessandro Michele’s avant-garde approach to luxury has confounded the industry.

The fashion house’s financial results, released this summer, showed a phenomenal 43.4% sales growth. Even more striking is that Gucci, whose catwalk set mapped the Roman site of Horace’s Villa and whose show notes touched on post-structuralism, is adored by a younger generation most fellow heritage brands struggle to connect with: half of all Gucci customers were born after 1980.

The fashion house’s grand strategy to align itself with the great names of Italian art and culture was played out in Milan

The catwalk is one of many platforms in Fendi’s grand strategy to align itself with the great names of Italian art and culture. Under this ambitious brand positioning – or “communion of intent”, in its CEO Pietro Beccari’s more elegant phrasing – Fendi has become a generous patron of the city of Rome, where it is based. The house paid the £2m bill for the recent restoration of the Trevi fountain, and staged a fashion show upon its reopening.

Women dominate the decor and the soundtrack in spirited display of defiance by designer Miuccia Prada

It is unfortunate for Prada that, in 2017, being compelling on the catwalk is like being rich in Monopoly. Sublime though the new collection shown in Milan was, with figures showing an 18% decline in net profit, what this brand needs is not applause but cold hard cash. Fashion weeks are now just one part of a huge industry where multi-platform success is essential. E-commerce, social media and partnerships with a ground army of “influencers” all matter as much as the show itself. Prada, one of the last of the luxury houses to embrace the digital age, is paying the price for tardiness.

Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Helena Christensen and Carla Bruni in Donatella Versace’s Milan show

Of everything Gianni Versace gave to popular culture – he invented the celebrity front row, the metal mesh cocktail dress and arguably the career of Elizabeth Hurley, who might never have found fame were it not for That Dress – the supermodel is his greatest legacy. So it was a fitting tribute that a supermodel reunion was the centrepiece of the Versace show staged to mark the 20th anniversary of his murder.

Versace invented the supermodel, plucking a few chosen models from the runway ranks and elevating them to a higher strata of glamour. Other models remained humble clothes horses, but this elite became goddesses. Versace, who was already conjuring the imagery of classical goddesses with his becomingly draped dresses, created the perfect women to wear them.

From sheer skirts over big pants to checked blazers with straw spaceship hats – here’s how to crack the catwalk code and translate crazy looks into real clothes

I know what you’re thinking: you wouldn’t dress like this if I paid you. Your dad’s 80s blazer, over a white lace nightie, with an upturned fruit basket on your head, punk choker and square sunglasses, a la Gucci? Er, I don’t think so. A cartoon-print Crombie coat with knee-high sport socks and winklepickers? Not today, thanks all the same, even if it is Prada.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re mistaken. You will dress like this. Not necessarily this week, or even this year, and not, I admit, exactly like this, because you would be bankrupt, and people would cross the street to avoid you. But still. The clothes you see here from Milan fashion week will have a huge effect on what all of us wear.

She was behind Beyoncé’s infamous pregnancy shot and has reinvented the look of Insta-models like Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner. Meet Marni Senofonte, the super-stylist who knows what’s on trend way before you do

Breakfast with Marni Senofonte, LA-based super-stylist to Beyoncé and Kendall Jenner, was never going to be a slice of toast. She emerges from the lift lobby in her smart Mayfair hotel, hugs me, finds us a corner table, takes off her sunglasses, hails a waitress and orders as follows: an almond milk cappuccino, a double-shot espresso, a cup of ice, some turkey bacon (“Very, very burnt, please”), a baguette with butter, mashed avocado on rye toast and fresh pineapple juice.

When the drinks arrive, Senofonte stirs two sugar cubes into the cappuccino, takes a sip and puts the cup down in its saucer, never to be touched again. A few moments later, she inquires after the double-shot espresso, which turns out to have gone into the cappuccino when she wanted it on the side. The double shot appears, and Senofonte pours it over the ice. Now she needs a straw. This arrives, along with the turkey bacon and the avocado toast, but the bacon isn’t crisp enough, so it goes back. Senofonte cuts the avocado toast into tiny pieces, pushes them around the plate, but doesn’t eat any. The turkey bacon reappears, crispier, but still not crisp enough. “That’s OK,” she says cheerfully. “I don’t really need to eat this stuff, I just need to smell it in the morning.” She picks up a shard of the bacon in her pointed fingernails and waves it around like a cigarette for the rest of our conversation. By now, our table is almost collapsing under the piled-up plates, but the only thing Senofonte consumes is the double-shot espresso, which she inhales through the straw in one gulp. “That’s the only part I really need,” she explains. “The cappuccino, that’s only there to make me look like an adult.”

The timing was insane. Lemonade came at a time when life was like, pelting lemons at me, you know?

The thing I love about these new models is, they are like the 90s supermodels. They are like little rock stars

The French fashion house’s first female creative director nodded to its heritage with a breezy femininity

Under previous designer Riccardo Tisci, rottweilers were a motif of the house of Givenchy. They snarled from T-shirts and sweatshirts worn by Rihanna and Justin Bieber. With his replacement by Clare Waight Keller, who presented her first collection on Sunday morning, the house has been given a new mascot in Purrkins, a silken black cat who stars in the latest advertising campaign wearing a Givenchy-logo collar.

Where Tisci’s afterparties were notorious for being the latest night of Paris fashion week, Waight Keller celebrated her first show with an afternoon of tea and games at the British ambassador’s residence in the city.

The designer continues to break down barriers by showing how ethical clothing can hold its own on high-end catwalks

“Glamour for its own sake is not something I have ever been particularly interested in,” Stella McCartney said backstage after her catwalk show. Which could sound like a facetious statement from a fashion designer who was, at that moment, standing among the marble-slabbed floors, elaborately frescoed ceilings and giant chandeliers of the Palais Garnier opera house, where the show was staged.

But McCartney has broken down barriers between high fashion and ethical fashion by straddling two worlds. Her mission statement is that clothes made from sustainable viscose and cruelty-free alternatives to leather should not be targeted at a niche market, but shown to hold their own on the Paris fashion week catwalk.

Late designer’s fierce elegance and formidable character represented in front of six 10m high waterfalls at Grand Palais

Karl Lagerfeld took over the house of Chanel in 1983, a decade after Coco Chanel’s death. He has kept her alive ever since.

Her fierce elegance and formidable character remain the brand’s biggest assets and were on display at its latest Paris fashion week spectacular.

Looking chic is so last season. The news in from Paris fashion week is that you know you’re looking good when someone compares you to Frankenstein, a dry cleaner’s bag or even dessert

Neutral now takes in the natural shades of autumn: falling leaves, blackberries, mud and butternut squash, which means you can wear them without the statement-making associated with wearing a colour

You’re not going to like this, but we are at peak grey. For a decade, grey has been the go-to shade for your urbane-but-laid-back lifestyle. Grey marl sweatshirt in your cupboard, Pavilion Gray walls in your kitchen, Inkwell filter on your Instagram grid. But fashion is always, in the end, cyclical, and grey is getting close to becoming boring again. Anyone remember John Major?

You can reset pretty much anything, in fashion. There are no fixed points. Grey can go from boring to chic and back again. And the meaning of neutral can shift, from a label that brackets together pencil-shaded cool tones – paper white, charcoal, blue-grey, black – to one that takes in the natural shades of autumn. Falling leaves. Blackberries. Mud. Butternut squash at lunchtime.

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

The latest designer collaboration from H&M is with Erdem, the Canadian Turkish designer known for his work with textiles, prints and ultra-feminine gowns. Expect faux-fur coats, jacquard dresses and florals for men. But is the high street ready for a £150 ballgown?

Go big or go home: that is the new party dress code. Forget the little black dress, and get ready for the grand gown. When Erdem x HM drops on 2 November, the smart money will be snapping up a £149 party dress with intricate snowdrop embroidery on formal stiff jacquard, embellished with a traditional grosgrain bow and falling from a precisely gathered waist into a voluminous, ankle-length tiered skirt.

The November issue of British Vogue features Claire Foy in a floor-sweeping, dusty-pink ballgown by Christian Siriano. As the star of Netflix drama The Crown, Foy is no stranger to a ballgown. The Crown, Downton Abbey, the Queen’s 90^th birthday last year, Gucci’s sponsorship of an exhibition of English aristocratic style at Chatsworth House and the resurgence of Princess Diana as a style icon that has accompanied the 20th anniversary of her death are combining to revive the ballgown, a style of dress that until recently seemed as anachronistic to modern entertaining as the bouillon spoon.

When she’s not storming the catwalk, or lunching with former first ladies, Naomi Campbell has a front row seat at major shows, and a place on the masthead of fashion bible Vogue

The year 1990 was a good one for Naomi Campbell. That January opened with a spot on thatsupermodel cover of British Vogue, alongside Cindy, Christy and Linda. After that came the covers of French and Italian Vogue, as well as posing for Peter Lindbergh in a convertible full of dalmatians in a classic Grace Coddington shoot for American Vogue (that still turns up on moodboards to this day), walking for Gianni Versace in Milan and lip-syncing for George Michael’s Freedom ‘90 video. Not bad.

Now 2017 looks to be an equally good year for Campbell, now aged 47, a career arc that defies the norms of modelling. This is the age of the Naomissance.

Affordable no longer means boring. Welcome to the post-basic age of real fashion

I bet you think you know how to shop the high street. I mean, who doesn’t? It’s what we all do. You, me, the women I squish up next to at fashion shows, the women I squish up next to on the Victoria line. Yes, there are women who wear exclusively designer clothes, but even on the fashion front row they are in a tiny minority. That there are rich fashion pickings to be had at high-street prices is not news.

Still – and don’t take this the wrong way – most of us are shopping the high street all wrong. The principles by which we approach what we buy from what shop lag behind the reality of what is out there. To get the best out of the high street, we need to think again.

It’s time to forget stripes and sport spots

Look, if it helps, think of them as stripes that happen to be circular. Because frankly, I don’t know what your problem is. How many striped tops do you have in your wardrobe? Yes, including Bretons. Yup, also including cotton striped shirts. Thought so. Quite a few. So, why so sniffy about polka dots?

I do know why, really, of course I do. Spots are a bit… well, daft. Stripes go faster, spots are dotty. But that’s exactly why they’re fun. Nobody expects us, the grown-up fashionables, with our intelligently sourced, upscale, high-street Scandinavian, day-to-night pieces in muted tones, to wear spots. So, let’s do it.

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

The strangest thing about Bulletproof Coffee isn’t stirring a pellet of grass-fed butter and a dollop of coconut oil into your morning cup and calling it breakfast, weird though that is to swallow. No, what makes Bulletproof really unusual is the trajectory the trend has followed. The craze started with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who turned the alleged weight-shedding, brainpower-enhancing benefits of caffeine turbocharged with fat into a mini-empire. He took the idea to Santa Monica, where he opened a cafe. David Beckham started dropping in.

From there, it spread to fashion. Vogue has called it “the new green juice”; at the recent fashion shows, it was on the way to replacing espresso and egg-white omelette as the standard front-row breakfast. Dan Brown, whose novels surely give him zeitgeist bragging rights, has been telling interviewers how 4am writing sessions for his latest book, Origin, were fuelled by Bulletproof. Asprey’s ready-made, cold-pressed Bulletproof products are about to go on sale in Whole Foods Market stores, at which point the journey from Silicon Valley quirk to bona fide hipster lifestyle trend will be complete.

Silicon Valley is a driving force behind a boom in veganism, powered by enthusiasm for healthy, sustainable faux-meat

Related: Hollywood? It’s finished, claims Oscar-winning director who fled to New York

Silver is useful, because it takes boringly easy clothes and makes them look dynamic and exciting

When I bought my Carrie silver-foil midi-length skirt from Whistles, I remember thinking that a silver skirt was a slightly ridiculous purchase, even by my standards, and I was left wondering if I would ever wear it. That was six years ago, and I still wear that skirt loads.

Actually, if I remember correctly, the Carrie turned into a bit of a cult – Whistles even had to give it its own email address, possibly a first for a skirt – but the revelation, for me, was the colour. Before that, I associated silver with Courrèges-style A-line minis and tiny, shiny dresses such as the one Elizabeth Hurley wears in Austin Powers. The kind of clothes, in other words, that I don’t wear.

Related: What I wore this week: the new neutrals

For millennials, this annual chance to dress up will soon be bigger than Christmas. Which means the perfect costume is no longer a sheet over your head, but something that speaks to the zeitgeist

Pop quiz time. Halloween represents: a) A sorry indictment of the Americanisation of our culture. Whatever happened to a penny for the guy, eh? b) Sweets. c) An outfit that requires weeks of planning, which is unusual for you, as you generally can’t commit to anything more than 24 hours in advance. If you answered a), you are over 50. If you answered b), you are under 14. If you answered c), you are a millennial.

Halloween is now essentially Coachella with fake blood instead of false eyelashes. In the modern calendar, the day looms, suddenly, large. As the rites and rituals that ebbed away along with church congregations are replaced by new ones rooted in fashion, celebrity and popular culture, Halloween becomes ever more prominent. When spring comes around, we don’t make Easter bonnets any more, we make flower crowns for summer festivals. The day pumpkin spiced lattes are back at Starbucks is now bigger than Shrove Tuesday. And Halloween will soon be bigger than Christmas. At which point, we are essentially pagan again, I guess.