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How to dress: jumpers with words

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'Text has never been so fashionable'

The fashion snob inside me is screaming right now. I'm going to be honest: I have always felt clothes with words on to be fashion for stupid people. Style is storytelling using silhouette and colour and fabric and reference. The message is supposed to be in the clothes, not scrawled on them. In other words: if you're doing your clothes right, they shouldn't need subtitles.

And yet, what do I know, because it seems that subtitles are the height of chic. Perhaps it's a spin off from watching subtitled Scandi dramas that these days we feel hip and culturally on-point if we're looking at words. Print news circulation notwithstanding, text has never been so fashionable: open any interiors magazine at random and chances are you will find vintage fairground lit-up letters, salvaged 1940s tin bakery signage and/or Emin-esque neon scribbles on the page. I also suspect that, on a more pragmatic level, the rise of online shopping has a hand in this. Clothes with words on, like those in bright colours, jump out of the screen.

Anyway, the point is that the text-emblazoned sweater is back, albeit in slightly more high-minded form than when logomania ruled the fashion airwaves. Advertising the name in your label is not what this is about; this season's spoken-word fashion is a speech bubble in knitwear form. At mass fashion level, the message is usually fairly anodyne. Lucky, Happy, Chic are going to sell you more knitwear units than Disillusioned, Bored, Spotty. Sophistication is easily added by the use of French words, or the word Paris, so expect a silent greeting of Bonjour to become a high-street commonplace.

Wordy fashion isn't going to win any literary prizes, but that's not the point. Clothes with words on have always been cheerful and informal. These are not clothes you will be wearing to the opera, but clothes you will be wearing to the pub. You can talk over them, in other words. A year ago, jumpers with dogs on were the new jumpers with pineapples on. Now, jumpers with words on are the new jumpers with dogs on. If I were you, I wouldn't read too much into it.

• Jess wears jumper, £119, marksandspencer.com. Skirt, £59, cosstores.com. Sandals, £245, russellandbromley.co.uk.

Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management.


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