Are you still a fashion virgin?

Losing your fashion virginity happens something like this.

As a fashion virgin all fashions will seem new to you, mostly because you are still gloriously young and inexperienced.

Then one day a fashion comes along which reminds you faintly or strongly of something you’ve seen before, but which went out of fashion, surely never to return, discounted or sneered at by all the fashionistas.

Only now suddenly the same people are loving it and promoting it. It’s actually recycled and rebranded fashion but you will never hear that phrase and no one will admit to it.

Jeans are the prime example. My fashion awakening occurred during the New Wave era when jeans were narrow and straight and ‘She won’t be able to sit down in those’ was considered a genuine sartorial compliment. My jeans were so form-fitting that I had to lie down on my bedroom floor to be able to do the zip up easily. I was terribly proud of this proof of haute couture and told all my friends.

In those days the worst fashion faux pas you could make, we thought, was wearing ‘flares’. Wearing flares was somehow akin to liking prog rock or Abba, activities which were equally inadmissible.

To my older sister, however, my new jeans looked old-fashioned and a bit ridiculous. In her eyes straight jeans were nothing more than the despised ‘drainpipes’, remembered from her childhood, worn by old-fashioned people who thought they were still 1950s Teddy boys, whereas her demographic had progressed onto flares.

I was still too young and too impressionable to see or have any need to see the bigger picture. At that stage in life you just want to blend in by wearing what the herd wears.

I also think at school you pick up a largely linear view of history, a bit like evolution: we got to today from yesterday and things don’t evolve backwards, do they? Dinosaurs aren’t coming back. You think you and today’s fashion are the apex of history, as indeed you both are at that particular tiny moment.

Then you get to, for example, your late twenties. That’s when it hits you. In my case it was seeing what I thought of as the despised flared jeans flaunted in the windows of clothes chains like Gap and H&M. I gawped. ‘They’re not flares, they’re bootcut ,’ the sales assistant insisted. Agreed there might be minimal differences between the two articles — fashion protects itself by building in subtle changes and can’t be blamed for it — but in essence ‘They’ are repeating and rebranding a fashion previously deemed unwearable.

‘Remember a few years ago when those things called Breton tops were in fashion?’ someone much younger than myself commented to me a few years ago. I was a bit surprised. Surely she must realise Breton tops are around all the time, just feature some years more than others, but no, she clearly saw them as extinct.

One day she will open up a magazine and see some terrible strapline such as, ‘Shipshape: our guide to seaside chic’, or, ‘Get your stripes: nautical-but-nice fashion’, and there the Breton top will be, along with wide-legged white trousers (presumably not called flares or bootcut) and a vaguely nautical navy jacket. Fashion recycling.

Hopefully that will be the moment she loses her fashion virginity. It can be an appearance-changing moment. You realise the phrase ‘new fashion’ is actually an oxymoron: fashion is cyclical and repetitive, is renamed and rebranded.

Losing this fashion virginity doesn’t mean you fall out of love with fashion. On the contrary maybe you even love it more, because now you have discovered one of its secrets and so you are beginning to free yourself to be personally stylish rather than merely following fashions which may or may not look good on you. No longer a fashion virgin.