Promise me you won’t buy a suede skirt in the sales. It’s for your own good. Don’t take this lightly: you will need to be strong, because a suede skirt sales purchase may seem like a good idea. You’ve seen lots of people wearing them, but have until now been put off by the fact that (a) the nice ones are pricey, and (b) it’s not something you usually wear, so you’re a bit nervous. And then you’re in the sales and suddenly suede skirts are half the price they were, so that objection is swept away, and you’ve seen so many you feel blase about how to wear them. And so you drop, say, £30 or £40 on one. Please don’t. Save your money for something more worthwhile. Like those pots of fresh fruit with a 500% mark-up for being cut into dinky slices and packaged in plastic, or lottery tickets, or Sunday morning yoga classes you know you’ll never actually get to. Seriously, any of the above represent better value for money than a suede skirt bought at this stage of the game.
I was joking about the lottery, though. You need to save your thrifty, skirt-avoiding pennies for a suede jacket, you see. The 70s trend is going precisely nowhere for autumn, and the vaguely boho suede jacket is making a bid to replace the leather bomber/biker as the mid-season, goes-with-anything layer. Suede skirts are easy to wear in summer but much harder come autumn – they look odd with tights, but can work well with a knee-high leather boot – whereas a boxy suede jacket with a collar works as well over a chunky polo neck in November as it does over a fine cotton vest in July.
Burberry’s spring/summer catwalk was a suede riot, from kingfisher blue to honeybee yellow, blasting aside the assumption that suede comes in any colour as long as it is drab. A brown suede jacket is a classic, but it is hard to cut free of the notion that if you get too close it will smell of ashtrays. Black or navy is perhaps the easiest choice; a bright colour a good way of breaking suede free of its mustier associations. But frankly, so long as it’s a jacket and not a skirt, it’s modern enough for me.
• Jess wears suede jacket, £399, hobbs.co.uk. Cami top, £45, topshop.com. Skirt, £195, youmustcreate.com. Heels, £48, office.co.uk.
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management.
