I suppose I’m duty bound to take issue with Julie Burchill’s assertion that “Women who most immerse themselves in fashion lead bleak emotional lives”. But she may have a point. On the other hand, while you probably can’t technically be moderately immersed in anything, any more than you can be moderately obnoxious or moderately dead, colloquially (I have decided) you can. And being moderately immersed (I have decided) is a laudable quality.

Think of the ingenuity deployed by women who are moderately immersed in fashion during times of war, deprivation and fat days. Can’t get seamed stockings? Stop whining and get out the Bisto, although I’m not sure I believe coating one’s legs in gravy ever made it really big, because how would one ever walk down a street without being mugged by a pack of dogs? Too poor to enter la-di-dah shops? Open your own and become Vivienne Westwood. Without women who are moderately immersed in fashion, the British economy would not so much have ground to a halt aeons ago as never got started. Bond Street would have been laid waste to make way for a giant Scalextric. John Galliano would be an unemployed tramp. It just doesn’t bear thinking about.

That brings us to the current fad for shorts’n’tights, yet another triumph of ingenuity on the part of she who is moderately immersed. Designers pushed shorts for seasons – that’s centuries in fashion terms – but had little to show for their efforts. That’s because they put them on unfeasible creatures such as Sasha Pivarova and accessorised them with bare legs as, get this for utter naivety, a summer item.

The customer, who is always right, knew better. Shorts are a winter item. At least they are in Britain, where our hideous summers are the price we pay for relatively mild winters and where, as every teen girl knows, shorts are exactly what drawerfuls of last year’s opaque tights have been waiting for. Once the Peaches crowd, with their more accessible figures and DIY manicures, adopted them (above), it was only a matter of time.

Shorts’n’tights are not to be confused with short’n’tight. One is a tarty horror. The other is a cute, practical new wardrobe staple – the young girl’s answer to her mother’s suits. Shorts’n’tights are sassy and sexy in a sweet, dimply, Cheryl Cole sort of way. They enable girls whose guardians wouldn’t allow them to wear a mini to school to wear something equally short. They keep out draughts, they cover up cellulite, they’re a bit rock’n’roll without being controversial. Note that I have ring-fenced all these bonuses for young girls. That’s because past a certain age (roughly speaking, Kate Moss’s – she’ll be the gatekeeper of what is age-appropriate when she’s 100) shorts’n’tights are a no-no. Not bleak. Just life.

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