Jubilee fever is here, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s a particularly British kind of fever though, and the symptoms include grumbling, head-shaking and negative comments. If you’re not a Brit, it would be easy to believe we’re not looking forward to the Jubilee and the Olympics, but that’s just the way we show our enthusiasm along with queuing and complaining about the weather. We love it really.

And red, white and blue are everywhere. Union Jack biscuits, dip-dye haircuts and waistcoats abound, so how does the average stylish individual cope with this sudden desire to dress like a deckchair on acid?

The answer is coordination. For men, this year’s big deal on casual clothing will be white. Spearheaded by the David Beckham underwear phenomenon, layered white clothing will be big for guys: aim for a white vest, under a white shirt or a white polo-shirt with white jeans and a navy jacket. Don’t attempt this look with very short hair though, as it can easily start to look like you’re an escaped mental patient, especially if you’re slim built. The hair look that goes with white clothing is longer than in many recent summers, tousled and shiny.

For women this year the trend will be into the navy end of the spectrum, picked out with a lot of bling. For casual wear, try mixing it up with a blue skirt and hoody with platform trainers and a big diamante brooch, or jeans, a striped blue and white shirt, pearls and a sleek updo finished off with a red, white and blue bow or rosette.

More formal wear is looking Olympian with blazers for both men and women being worn over pastel polo shirts. Taffeta skirts are around for women, worn with a camisole and beaded cardigans to allow for the changeable British weather. Umbrellas are de rigueur and of course the only acceptable brolly colour this year is red, white and blue!

If you’ve been inspired by the new Stella McCartney uniforms and want to dress in the same streamlined style as Britain’s Olympic hopefuls, here are a few tips to help you get the look and to get the fitness, if not of an Olympian, at least of a contender!

1. Focus on navy – Stella McCartney chose a dense shade of navy to be the background of many of the uniform components, to create an effect of strength and solidity. Navy blue T-shirts and vests are great for showing off well-sculpted arms, and if you’re aren’t brilliantly developed, try some fake tan to help give definition to pecs.

2. Combine tight and loose – soft flowing jog pants look good with camisole tops for women, while men can benefit from skin-tight cycling shorts worn with loose polo-shirts: the contrast in shape and form can help hide major problems such as a pot belly.

3. Red shoes – McCartney put her athletes in red training shoes, and that’s likely to be a keynote of this year’s sporting looks in the UK, so if you can’t get red shoes, try for socks that are solid red or have a red band to them, red gloves for winter running or football training and red hats or baseball caps for summer training.

4. Hoodies are definitely very much part of the focus, and the lighter the fabric weight the better, as layering sports clothing is going to be crucial for our athletes this year, in the UK’s changeable summer climate.

A professional networking coach in the USA has come up with a fascinating way to help graduates get a good job.

Her theory is that the current generation of college students have spent so much time on their mobiles or computers that they have lost the ability to network effectively and so they miss out on chances to obtain employment.

Her idea is to equip students with a simple grey T-shirt that bears the legend netWORKing on the front and on the back a printed ticklist of careers such as engineering, technology, sales, insurance … and then a dotted line that allows the individual to fill in their career aims or specific skills with an indelible marker, supplied with each garment.

It seems to be popular: orders have been placed by half a dozen American colleges already.

Any innovative graduate, class or college could undertake something similar – a white hoodie with an overprinted message about the skills of the wearer could be just the thing for a job fair, and a band, group of collaborators or ensemble could print T-shirts with their key skills and availability on them.

As businesses increasingly invest in uniforms for staff, more and more people are trying to look good in workplace clothing that wouldn’t be their personal choice of attire.

If your employer wants you to look smart and professional, it’s one thing. But if the workplace uniform is a colour that makes you look ill, or fits you badly or just doesn’t sit well with your personal clothing style, it can become a source of tension and even stress.

There are a number of things you can do, to prevent this being a problem.

1. If you get to choose your uniform from a catalogue, ask for samples. The manufacturer or printer of company clothing will usually be able to provide pieces for you to look at and that will help you assess the fit of the clothing and how it will be to wear. That helps you make wise choices about what you opt for.
2. Examine the fit, where possible, by looking at the existing uniform worn by colleagues. It is always better to buy a size bigger and pay a little to have your clothing fitted to your form, than to buy too small and cram yourself into something uncomfortable for an eight or ten hour day.
3. If the colour is bad for you, look at what you can do to accessorise your workplace uniform. There are often restrictions on what you can wear over uniform but not under it, so a black polo-neck under an unflattering yellow or red polo will ‘take down’ the strong colour, or a pink camisole under a white shirt will add life to a colour that kills your complexion.

This year’s key summer fashions are sport and fun related – they are girls dressing as guys and grown men dressing in a more childlike fashion. Don’t get it wrong though – the boy look is not for work: this year men are dressing smartly for work and for fun in their time off, and it’s not just a casual look either, the boy look requires a kind of style that has a sharp and amusing edge to it.

For men this means working with colour: dyed denim is big this year so it might be bright red jeans with a white T-shirt and a pair of spotty or chequerboard Converse trainers. For the beach it could mean ‘cartoon’ shorts (ie a pair long and baggy enough to flap around) in bright blue or red, worn with a yellow or green baseball cap and a curl of hair that flips about boy-style. It doesn’t mean clever slogans on T-shirts, looking too cool, or wearing all one colour.

For women the tomboy look is definitely featuring baseball jackets or blousons, often made of silk and worn over many layered vests to give a lightweight but athletic look to casual clothing. Boyfriend jeans are big, as are Capri pants or joggers in bright but not girly colours: think purple, green and yellow, rather than pink or powder blue. The boiler-suit is trying to make a come-back but it may not be this year that it breaks through again. Oversize T-shirts are heading back though, worn over a contrast colour camisole and leggings, with Converse high-tops.

It’s claimed that America’s competitive industries are becoming more stylish as competition for scarce resources hots up. The trend has started in Hollywood, where the stars my have an unlimited budgets to dress themselves but those working in the film industry are needing to look smart or risk being seen as having not enough smarts (or resources) to make deals.

The Hollywood Reporter suggests that deal makers in America are moving away from their casual, Silicon Valley garb of polo shirts and jeans because the tough world at the box office (and especially with John Carter reported to be the biggest flop of Disney history) means that stylish dressing and power appearance are vital to looking serious.

Baseball caps and hoodies are out, and formal shirts are in. While suits are universal, they are definitely making a come-back and casual clothing is being reserved much more for ‘in the office’ days.

For women this dress sense often means dresses – tailored ones with long-sleeved jackets, or smart trousers with tailored shirts. Monogrammed shirts are big in Hollywood right now, and as monogramming adds little to the price of a shirt but can be a make or break in closing a deal, it’s definitely a discreet way of pegging yourself as a winner.

According to a Mintel report into American men’s clothing choices, many men want to be more fashionable than they are – in fact a quarter of them would love to be able to be fashion conscious. A senior retail and apparel analyst at Mintel claims that 85% of men who say they shop just for comfortably clothing would be willing to step out of their ‘clothing comfort zone’ if they knew what looked good on them.

So how can a man get to be fashion conscious and clothing comfortable?

One way is to use the support of social media. Many more men are learning to try on clothing and then send a photo to their friends and family members for an instant vote on whether to buy the garment or not.

Another way is to create outfits online, using new platforms like pinterest, to pull together clothing boards for special events or to plan holiday packing lists, and then get others to have input to the suggested choices. This is proving increasingly useful for men when shopping online, as it allows other people to contribute to their boards by adding items that would work with existing clothing. For example, when planning clothing for a weekend away, a man may have a pair of trousers and a hoodie that he particularly wants to take along. He uploads picture of them to his board and then others add items to build capsule outfits. The hoodie, with a striped T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops for the beach, then the trousers with a casual shirt, boots and unstructured jacket for the Saturday evening and finally the hoodie with a black polo-shirt and the trousers for a trip to the pub on Sunday lunchtime. Other accessories such as caps and scarves, belts and even jewellery can be suggested and accepted or rejected and then, for the chosen items, searched for online to get the best price.

Researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, have found some interesting features of workplace clothing that are revealed in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Not only can our clothing influence the way other people think about us, it can actually influence the way we think!

According to the research, “ …cloth[ing] can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioural consequences for … wearers,” – what that means is that work-wear that is generally associated with attentive and careful behaviour, such as lab coats, will actually make the person wearing them more attentive and careful.

Of course this theory is individual specific – so if you associate T-shirts with creative endeavour, you may feel more creative when wearing a T-shirt to work, but if you associate hoodies with lounging around the house at weekends, you may find that wearing one to work actually decreases your productivity. Adam Galinsky, a co-author of the paper, calls this process of being influenced by clothing “enclothed cognition”.

For workplaces that don’t have a dress code this may be an incentive to reconsider their stance, and for individuals preparing for interviews, it may be worth considering which colours they associate with positivity and confidence and which shirts and trousers (or skirts) make them feel assured and dependable, as those are the qualities that they may gain from their clothing during the interview itself.

Asda has been conducting research – and it reveals that 68% of shoppers spend money on clothing to cheer themselves up, and that the clothing they choose tends to be brightly coloured. According to Asda, women will reach for red, purple and yellow to boost their confidence on a bad day.

So how does it work?

Medically speaking, colour therapy is not a science but there are several forms of sensory ‘therapy’ that give a person experience of specific colours either in their clothing, or in their environment, or sometimes in the way their home or office is lit: the efficacy of this as a medical treatment is unclear, but the effect of certain colours is long known to have been powerful in influencing others: that’s why monarchs or rulers have always chosen red and purple, which connote majesty and power (and maybe, sexual power too, as red is the traditional colour of sex workers) and spiritual leaders have always chosen pale blue and white, colours seen as being ‘pure’ and full of hope and life.

Yellow is a fascinating colour that falls in and out of favour: many men like to wear yellow in summer as they see it as being sporty – so yellow polo shirts and yellow or yellow checked shorts tend to start selling well around Easter. Women wear yellow in times of optimism, but reject it in times of pessimism, so if yellow is a big colour this year, it’s likely that people will be feeling positive about the economic climate.

If you want to look positive and attract others, the best colour to wear as a man, apparently, is a bright light blue so a turquoise jacket or hoodie would be ideal, while for women, it’s a small amount of red with pink or white, so a white and red ringer T-shirt with pink Capris or a white long-sleeved T-shirt with a long red and white gingham skirt would be perfect. And if you think those colour combinations sound like something out of a Rock Hudson/Debbie Reynolds movie, you’d be right … because those are considered to be amongst the most upbeat films around!

Angela Hill in the Seattle Times is concerned that we have become too casual to care and her story includes people who wear low-hanging trousers to court when they are on probation, rather than the suit, tie and good haircut that used to be the defence lawyer’s weapon of choice. One of her interviewees compares current fashion to the ‘before’ look on makeover shows.

This is a difficult subject – dressing too formally can make you look like a bore, or even worse, somebody who is deliberately trying to look like they are in charge of the office, the party or even the universe! Too casual though, and your appearance can suggest you are depressed, or just somebody who likes to be dirty, discouraging and maybe even a bit dim-witted.

Danny Miller, whose book Blue Jeans is to be published in March, is an anthropologist who ahs studied the role of casual clothing, specifically the denim revolution and its role in shaping identity.

Some psychology studies suggest that people who wear dull and badly fitting clothing or are given stained clothing to wear for several months, actually end up with lowered self-esteem, so perhaps dressing too casually has an effect on our mental health and a bright new T-shirt or crisply ironed white shirt are as important to our wellbeing as good food and exercise?