Not a million years ago, I wrote with some sadness that the sequin was out of step with the times. It had been caught in all its gleeful glory in the crossfire of the hedge-funders’ final shoot out and the meltdown of Alistair Darling’s tangoing eyebrows. In a flash, what had looked bright and bouncy looked tired and tawdry.

Six months on, either the sequin has changed or the mood has – although, naturally, the economic pundits don’t know it yet. Sometimes it takes a sequin to tell it how it is.

Maybe the sequin is the symbol of fashion’s Blitz (oh, come on, let’s make it glitz) spirit. Maybe it’s simple resignation, the realisation that even if our children won’t have an NHS any more, we can at least reintroduce some texture and variety to our wardrobes. Suffice to say, if Balmain can come up with a £14,000 sequin cardigan and put it out there with a straight face, I think we can assume that the gag reflex with which we greeted all excess in the immediate Lehman’s fallout is now relaxing somewhat.

Mind you, there are sequins – and sequins. There are the sequins that trouble you because they cost so little and bring with them the troublesome image of young, dextrous hands toiling for small return. There are tacky sequins (clue: they’re the ones hanging by a thread before you even get them out of the store). There are sequins that are too brassy, and sequins that are too flimsy. Price is usually, but not always, a reliable guide.

Then we come to Old Sequins versus New Sequins. Old Sequins are anything that might have appeared on a long, stiff gown at the Oscars in the past ten years. New Sequins tend to be attached to leggings; funky, drapey little vest-type tops; or sloppy boyfriend blazers, reconfigured for this summer and autumn (when it will be ubiquitous) as a jacket your boyfriend would not conceivably ever have worn unless he is also a drag queen.

New Sequins have cascaded forth from fashion’s cool brigade: Alexander Wang (black, halfway between matt and shine, worn with leggings and a kind of souped-up biker boot); Christopher Kane (outsized, layered on to organza minidresses); Preen (black, backless apron dresses); and nearly everyone else, too. New Sequins are dressed down, worn slouchily (an off-the-shoulder tunic over skinny trousers), ironically (smothered over a pair of leggings that would previously have been strictly Pussycat Dolls territory), during the day with pinstripes or denim, or with a pair of very large shoulder pads, to ram home that they are indeed New and not Old.

Truth to tell, there is some slippage in the distinction between New and Old. A few weeks ago, at a party for the latest crop of Royal College of Art fashion graduates, the design consultant and tutor Anne Tyrell wore a white (chicly, it matched her hair) matt sequined tunic dress that she’d designed herself in the Eighties. Dust them off, bring them down, lighten up.

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