We’ve all got one: a slaggy story about the morning after, when Lady Luck changed her mind. A universal tale of bum-clenching humiliation, knowing looks, public transport and the inappropriate click-click of spike heels at 7am on a work day.

There is the friend who, after a serious fashion party, had a mortifying stumble home at 8.45am in Louboutin heels and a white fur jacket. As she tried to flag a taxi on a street corner, she clocked a mother on the school run shielding her daughter’s eyes.

Then there is the girl who had gone to a fancy-dress party as Dame Barbara Cartland, and hadn’t factored in the stagger home the next day as a vision in pink chiffon and colostomy-bag-coloured tights.

But lately, something has happened. The “morning after” look has morphed from ignominy to desirability — the walk of shame has become chic. Pick up any tabloid and there they all are, the cream of London’s youth, working the look. Peaches and Pixie, Agyness Deyn and Alexa Chung, all caught in daylight dressed in night-before clothes — metallics, men’s cardigans, smudgy make-up, unbrushed hair and a squirt of eau de sex.

Like recession-led 1990s grunge — a grubby response to the big hair and shoulder pads of the greedy 1980s — WOS chic is both a financial and style backlash against boom-time dressing and sanitised head-to-toe designer wear. The look is also a chipped-varnish, two-fingered gesture to Wags and their perfect mani/pedis.

And the girls championing the look are even making it work on the red carpet. “I thought Lou Doillon was the prettiest girl at this year’s Met ball,” says Leith Clark, editor-in-chief of Lula magazine. “With her messy hair, floor-length Marni dress, shrunken leather jacket and flushed cheeks, she looked like she’d partied all night, when she had only just arrived.” As the designer Alice Temperley, no stranger to the all-night party herself, says: “Being a little rough around the edges is a good thing. You look like you are living a little.”

And, of course, the look makes for a good paparazzi shot. By blurring the boundaries between daywear and evening wear, the celebs are never caught out wearing the wrong kit at the wrong time. Unless you leave something behind, as Lily Allen did earlier this year. Photographed out on the town in cute denim shorts, stripy Breton T-shirt, mannish tailored jacket and thick black tights, she was spotted leaving a hotel mid-afternoon the next day — in the same cute WOS-chic outfit. Except, somewhere along the way, silly Lily had lost her tights.

WOS chic is definitely a look that favours the young, but older women who have hung up their shame boots and no longer spend Saturday morning crossing town with their faces stuck to minicab windows have their own version of the look. “In your thirties, it dawns on you that your blow-dry looks better the next day, as does your make-up. It’s that smudgy-eyed, just-got-out-of-bed look,” says Pippa Holt, fashion features associate at Vogue. So wear your shame with pride.

Times recommends

• It is possible to look stylish while pregnant
• Britain’s tot models
• Who and what benefits from the heat wave?