Reminiscing about last year's fashion

On the catwalk, summer 2005 was all about tiered skirts, beaded slippers worn with ankle bracelets, cheesecloth blouses with bead-strung neck ties and tumbling waves. Roberto Cavalli's colourful, baroque dresses were the height of sunny glamour and wedged heels and shorts were the look for the streets. But led by Alexander McQueen's Hitchcock-inspired collection of pencil skirts and Monroe dresses, and Roland Mouret's curvaceous Galaxy dress (no A-lister svelte enough stepped onto a red carpet in anything else), autumn focused on darker colours and clean lines.

The high street, too, had its fashion moment. The hottest buy of summer was Primark's £10 sequined shrug; six months later, crowds went wild for Stella McCartney's £99 tuxedo coat for H&M. Topshop further blurred the boundaries between high and lowfashion by staging a full-scale fashion show as part of London Fashion Week in September, a move copied two months later by Marks & Spencer.

All the high-street stores took their cues not just from the catwalk but from the prevailing look in music: rock-skinny androgyny, drainpipes and waistcoats, a little bit Bowie but with a certain Gucci gloss. Last winter, skinny jeans were for wearing under boots; this time round, they're for wearing with ballet flats, which is a more extreme look.