Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: this season’s big idea? Wear a skirt. It’s that simple

All you need to look on-trend this autumn is a skirt, but instead of going shopping, check what you already have in your wardrobe

I go to a lot of fashion shows, and sometimes they are gorgeous and sometimes they are ugly. Sometimes they are electrifying and sometimes they are deathly dull. Sometimes they are completely baffling. My absolute favourite kind of show is the one that makes me want to run home and change my outfit. A show that makes me think: there it is! That’s exactly what I want to wear. When the look speaks to me, as if it had been on the tip of my tongue. God, I love that.

Which is what happened at Prada this season. The idea was: skirts. That’s it, that’s the whole idea. The show was 63 different skirts – some with a sweater, some with a bra top, some with a jacket, but the point was the skirts. They were knee-length, give or take an inch up or down, and A-line, although sometimes a narrow almost-pencil and other times with a broader flare. There were skirts that wrapped like kilts, held together with strips of industrial-weight Velcro embroidered with tiny gems. There were stiff boxy pleated skirts and tube skirts painted with swirls, and dainty embellished skirts with a layer of gauze on top, like a petticoat worn on the outside.

And I sat there flipping through my wardrobe in my mind’s eye, suddenly desperate to wear skirts I haven’t thought about for ages: a silver leather skirt I got in H&M last year, a purple silk pleated vintage Chanel, a tiger print skirt that I bought the first time I went to Milan, nearly 25 years ago.

The skirt often gets overlooked in fashion. Trousers are more modern; a dress is more glamorous. The skirt feels sort of pedestrian: it is what you wore to school, what you wear to the office. Miuccia Prada, who wears skirts almost all the time, says that the under-the-radar vibe is what she likes about them. “You can get away with a lot, in a skirt,” she said backstage in her gnomic way. A skirt makes you seem sensible, which gives you licence to be secretly eccentric.

Mrs Prada said she prefers separates to dresses, because a dress is all one idea, one emotion, and how can that do justice to the way we think? Most people who wear separates reach automatically for a simple bottom half and a top half that projects a message, whether that is a colour, a formal collar or a plunging neckline. Mrs P flips that because she likes her clothes to have ideas, but doesn’t want the ideas to be too close to her face, as they get in the way when she’s speaking. She wears interesting clothes, but she also has interesting things to say, and she wants to give both these forms of expression airtime without shouting over each other. I love that.

Oh, and skirt rather than trousers just because if you put lots of ideas on a pair of trousers they get quite busy-looking. Very true. Skirts are particularly useful at a moment when fashion has got sort of fashion-y again. Colour and fringing and embellishment are less challenging to wear away from the face: team your loud skirt with your normal jumper and your normal face and you still look like you.

This is one of those fashion shifts that sounds incredibly minor – trousers yesterday, skirt today, hold the front page – but changes the mood of your whole wardrobe. It alters the geometry of your outfit, channels energy in a new way. One piece of the puzzle moves and everything looks different. The plain jumper that looks boring with jeans looks chic and unexpected over a fancy silk skirt. Shoes you had mentally retired make sense again.

Not only does this trend not require a shopping trip, I would actively recommend not shopping for it. Look in the back of your wardrobe. Skirts are peculiarly likely to survive wardrobe clear-outs because they take up almost no room and don’t tend to get excommunicated in the way that, say, a skinny jean does. Somewhere in there may be a pleated skirt from 2014, something satin you bought for a wedding. Wear it tomorrow. That’s it, that’s the whole idea. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a skirt to change into.

Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Model: Hanna at Body London. Hair and makeup: Delilah Blakeney using NARS. Skirt, £160, Essentiel Antwerp. Top, £65, and cashmere jumper, £190, Lands’ End. Mules, £99, Dune London. Earrings, £166, DPT Antwerp. Bracelet, £60, L’Atelier 73