In the fashion micro-bubble, sex is starting to look very last season. I mean, here we are in Milan, spiritual home of the sexpot, birthplace of the Dolce & Gabbana label, and we’re looking at models dressed like geography teachers. Not even 2008 geography teachers, who may well wear mini skirts and nose-bleed inducingly high shoes, but an impressionistic, tweedy blur of a geography teacher from the 1970s.

This may not be permanent — designers have been known to perform dramatic volte faces every six months. But when two designers who made their names with skin-tight dresses that deliberately revealed bras, corsetry and all the other underpinnings that had hitherto been a woman’s secret, find themselves overcome with an urge to produce herringbone dirndl skirts and ribbed polo-necks that reveal nothing, something’s up.

Modesty has been creeping back into vogue for some time. It’s a development not without benefits. The bare midriff, the evocatively named muffin top, the de rigueur paparazzi shot of a knickerless celebrity emerging from a car, now look very old hat. Covering up could be a really scandalous new tactic for the publicity-hungry celeb. Enter Dolce & Gabbana at their service. Not only were the skirts woolly or corduroy, but calf-length. And not only calf-length, but in shapes that haven’t been cool since — I was going to say since Julie Andrews ran some up from several sets of curtains in The Sound of Music — but I don’t think they were exactly cutting edge even then. And talking of lonely goatherds, there was a fair bit of straggly goat hair wandering up and down coats. Top this lot off with thick tights, block-heeled brogues and curly sheepskin gilets (shaggy textures will be inescapable next season unless you are in the tropics) and you have a look best described as cosy, sensible and Von Trappish monk.

Who knows if front-rowers Lindsay Lohan, Sheryl Crow and Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas will ever fully get to grips with this turn for the demure?

Lohan seemed to be studying those leg-swamping skirts intently. But given how much attention the nude picture of her on the cover of the latest issue of New York Magazine (in which she re-enacts Marilyn Monroe’s last sitting for Bert Stern) has been garnering, I wouldn’t bet on her embracing them.

She could go to Donatella Versace, who entertained calf-length skirts for about five minutes, and only when they were slinky and close-fitting. You could tell Versace’s heart was really with her mini-fitted coats and A-line dresses, which were plain and prim as a nun’s habit at the front but cut to flare into box pleats at the back and sliced at the thigh, all the better to swish over acres of tanned leg made to look even longer by vast clompy platforms (you get a lot of shoe for £700). Given their brevity the dresses looked classy and chic, thanks to the skilful cut and inky blue and aubergine colours. Trousers were skinny, worn with one-shouldered tops — destined for a thermostatically controlled world of limos, private jets and winters in Dubai.

Like many designers, Versace is moving away from surface embellishment, which may explain why her evening dresses sometimes seemed to be straying into Dior territory, with curved folds that spiralled round the body. These were less successful than the sharp, sleek, daywear, which, apart from the odd fuchsia mink dress could almost be called understated. Then again, in today’s emerging luxury markets, fuchsia mink probably counts as a basic.

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