How to wear: a skirt suit – but not as we know it

I’m not a fan of ironic fashion. “Isn’t it completely hilarious how I’m wearing clothes that ordinary people wear, when I am so very unique and dressing in this tongue-in-cheek manner because it serves to underscore my originality?” is way too much doublethink to swallow in one outfit. Also, it only really works if you have pastel hair and this season’s latest sleeve tattoo, so that no one can miss the humour with which you are wearing, say, a skirt suit, otherwise the joke falls flat. Just a thought, but if the joke revolves around finding people who aren’t as cool as you are intrinsically hilarious, doesn’t that make you a bit of a twat?

So, no, it’s not tongue in cheek, this skirt suit. And actually, I think it looks quite nice. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a little bit tricky to pull off wearing something so very sensible. The trouser suit has a clear role in fashion, rather than just office wear. A trouser suit is modern and feminist and grown up, but the skirt suit? Not so much. It never really graduated out of workwear.

This season, the skirt suit is having a moment. Fashion is going through a phase of elevating non-fashion pieces into catwalk pieces; there have been seasons of hoodies and anoraks, and fashion weeks awash with ugly trainers. Now it’s the turn of the ultimate corporate uniform, the skirt suit.

The only way to play it, I think, is straight. No weird trainers or kooky socks. A slogan T-shirt is not your friend here. For heaven’s sake, please don’t even think about a bumbag. Nor do you want to be buttoned up: if the jacket works as a top half without a blouse underneath, as it does here, and the fabric weight is such that you think you can get through the day without spontaneously combusting, then wearing just the skirt and jacket gives the outfit some room to breathe.

A double-breasted jacket or a long-line jacket with a tie belt is a good starting point to carry the suit into non-dreary territory. As for the skirt, hemline length is key. A two-piece with a skirt that finishes too precisely on the knee has a tendency to look like regulation school uniform. A longer-length skirt suit might sound off-puttingly dowdy but it looks, in fact, like fashion. And not, thank goodness, in an ironic way.