Public figures and their clothes have been totally in the spotlight this week. Piers Morgan has admitted that he’s become ‘much more conscious’ of his appearance since he took on his CNN show, which is suffering poor ratings. The former newspaper editor claims that it doesn’t matter how well the interviews on his show go, people ‘come up afterwards and say, ‘What was going on with your hair?’’

It’s probably time for him to look at his fitted suits and formal shirts and consider a more relaxed look of crisp chinos and a polo-shirt as Americans seem to find him ‘stuffy’.

Kate and Wills showed us that they can do the formal look as well as their more relaxed casual appearance with baseball hats and sweatshirts. Pippa Middleton’s bridesmaid dress wowed the crowds, but it wasn’t a new look – Cameron Diaz wore the same Alexander McQueen gown in public in 2009, except in red.  And Pippa’s  casual capris and soft shirt outfit, photographed on leaving the hotel the day after the ceremony have already sparked a run on the shops …

Casual royals courtesy of nothingtoomuch1

Increasing numbers of businesses are choosing to provide business clothing to their staff, partly as an investment in employees but mainly as a service to clients.

Looking look smart and professional is one reason for this choice, but another is the desire to present a coherent image across the company from website to business literature to staff on the front line.

Now that business workwear is more flexible, it can do much more than carry the company logo. It offers the opportunity to display contact details, convey special offers and deals or just to allow a staff member to be picked out as a distance.

And what about employees, how does this affect them? Many people are keen to move into uniform at times of recession as it decreases the amount they need to spend on work clothing. The most popular uniform clothing with under 30s is the hoodie, closely followed by the T-shirt, while over 30s tend to favour the polo-shirt as workplace clothing and are somewhat more dubious about casual clothing as uniform, with baseball caps being the most disliked item in their wardrobes.

If you want to look casual and chic at the same time, invest in making a capsule wardrobe so that your clothes give the impression that you’re a polished fashionista with a thousand looks. Here are five tips to capsule wardrobe success for winter:

1. Buy the best coat you can afford – a badly fitting coat makes you look terrible before you even get into the room, let alone reveal the perfect outfit you’re wearing underneath. Go with a long coat for winter, either trench or flared, and a shorter jacket that can be worn with jeans and leggings – choose a light-coloured jacket and dark coloured denim to have a slimming effect.

2. T-shirts are classic if you pick muted colours and funky if you go for bright colours and bold patterns – always team bold tees with flat shoes: heels with prints look too eighties for style success.

3. Add interest to a basic outfit with a skinny belt: leopard-skin works with navy and black, zebra with cream, grey and yellow and natural leather with all other colours.

4. Scarves, hats, gloves and belts all add interest but need to be coordinated with care – anything too bright can look clownish while dark colours are liable to look like uniform wear.

5. Accessories rule the fashionista wardrobe: buy jewellery, antique scarves and other fun items on ebay, etsy or from art students and craftspeople so you don’t look mass produced.

Or almost any other male celebrity who takes your fancy – assuming they are under thirty and dress in clothing that can be replicated through the major online retailers and high street fashion shops.

How? By visiting myCelebrityFashion.co.uk which has launched a men’s section this month, so that the Waynes of this world can keep up with their Coleens and the Davids with their Victorias.

The website reckons to reveal the latest male celebrity trends and where to buy them so ordinary folk can ‘steal the style’ of their favourite celebrities by using a tagging system that shows buyers where to similar, or even identical garments and accessories to those of the starts.

It’s linked to over 400 fashion retailers and generates sales by directing visitors to any items that take their fancy as stocked by those retailers. So it’s not necessarily the most cost effective way to look like a star!

So if you want to find a Steven Jones brown shirt, geek glasses like Matt Cardle, David Beckham’s black beanie and Channing Tatum cargo shorts, go visit the website – but remember to shop around to find clothing bargains that are just as good as those on the mycelebrity site, but may be a lot cheaper.

If you want to make the most of your grant, the last thing you need is to spend any more than necessary on clothes. This year the masculine fashion look is basic macho, which is cheap to buy. Invest in some crew-neck or round-necked T-shirts in military colours: white, charcoal, green and olive.  These are really simple to match with some of the other fashion looks for this year such as a four pocket field coat or a camouflage-coloured jacket.

Under your jacket or fleece you need a thin top – chunky jumpers make you look like the Michelin man, so pick a heather grey long-sleeved T-shirt to look like army combinations, or go for olive sweatshirts for the military fatigues look.

Jeans and trousers are more tapered – super skinny doesn’t suit everyone, but definitely aim for a slimmer look than last year.  Boots are definitely heavy-duty with chunky socks showing above the tongue. Pull-on caps of various kinds are still the headgear of choice, although fur caps with earflaps are appearing in a lot of student digs this year.

Now contestants have moved to the judges’ houses, there’s a lot of press attention on the audition clothes.  Cher Lloyd performed Get Your Swag On but a lot of attention was focused on her jeans rather than her voice, and she’s admitted that her gritty urban look was a personal achievement: she ripped her jeans herself!

According to the Daily Mirror, Matt Cardle had the winning voice for his amazing rendition of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, but some people think he let himself down on the appearance front in a cap and check work-shirt, or as the newspaper put it ‘Next time, he might even change out of his work clothes’.

The contestant whose clothing drew most criticism, along with her lifestyle, was Chloe Mafia, who’s been kicked off the show and is now doing the rounds of TV shows defending her behaviour. The Daily Mail says that she appeared on breakfast TV wearing a ‘tacky pink bra-top and matching tracksuit bottoms’ but that was better than her last TV appearance where she was seen rolling up for a day’s rehearsal, wearing the same clothes as the previous day and apparently reeking of vodka.

This year’s contestants were definitely in dress-down mode for the most part, some of the boys wore cargo shorts for the call-back, which was a new departure and there were many striped T-shirts on show during the dance segments. Girls still went for the little black dress a lot, but Gamu Nhengu rang the audition changes with a waistcoat over her T-shirt and a flower in her hair: if she carries on being a favourite, you can expect to see lots of this look in the High Street. Women can try it themselves with a white T-shirt under a sleeveless fleece and a silk rose in your hair or stitched to each end of your scarf.

As we pack away our flip-flops, thongs, mules, sandals and deck shoes of summer, and get ready for the motorcycle boots, training shoes, hiking boots, Uggs and Doc Martens of winter, it’s time to invest in socks that give us happy feet.

Most people know that sports socks are designed to keep feet cool and odour free but there’s a wide range of specialist sock wear out there (called hosiery in the trade) that can keep your winter feet cosy, safe and sweet-smelling.

Winter shoes tend to be thicker and heavier than summer ones which means feet can get tired more quickly. Support socks give feet special cushioning – they are often called crew socks and while they are designed for builders, soldiers and other people who spend all day on their feet, crew socks suit anybody who likes to have comfortable relaxed feet. Many specialist winter socks also have an antibacterial component to stop feet getting smelly or developing foot diseases.

Heavy winter clothing and fewer opportunities to get exercise mean that our winter bodies are more likely to develop conditions like fungal infections of the feet, head and armpits and good hygiene, wearing cotton next to the skin and regular washing of both bodies and clothes can help keep these nasties at bay. Feet are particularly prone to infections which is where good socks can help, but heads too can get itchy and dandruffy. Wearing a hat in winter is a good idea – choosing one you can wash easily means that you won’t be at risk of headlice. Hoodies can keep your head and ears warm on those days when the weather veers between okay and awful.

Esquire’s autumn fashion pundit says that orange is the new black, tartan (okay, they call it plaid, but we know what they mean) is the new denim and lace-up military boots are the biggest thing since flip-flops.

We all know that what happens on the catwalk has very little to do with most of us, especially when it comes to masculine fashion. So far, nobody’s tried to get Wayne Rooney to wear a skirt but it takes somebody of Beckham or Bowie stature to force a change in male styles, but there’s always a fashion trend or two that slides into public awareness.

Orange is probably going to get in under the radar this year. It’s been turning up on so many catwalks that it seems a very good bet for fashion success this autumn and winter. The way to wear it is as a polo-shirt or a scarf. Orange is being teamed with grey, especially grey flannel, so if you’re buying a suit or a smart jacket, pick a grey one to work with your orange casual clothing.

This year’s polo-shirts are being worn under V-necked sweaters, especially patterned V-neck ones, but also beneath grey sleeveless fleeces, rather than a bulky jacket. This gives a slimmer and more athletic silhouette which can best be matched with slimline trousers and fingerless gloves and a ski cap to keep the extremities warm.

Researchers at Southampton University have revealed their plans to develop clothing fabric that generates electricity through wearers’ movement and body heat. At it’s current level of generation, the technology is strong enough only to power individual items such as MP3 players but could soon be developed enough to support wireless health-monitoring systems such as those used in people with sleep apnea, epileptic fits or heart conditions.
One place that it might be used once is reaches a level where it can be aggregated is universities, to power campus equipment.

In the meantime, and before your university offer depends on your electricity generating status as well as your grades, if you’re one of the lucky teens who got a university place this year, what clothing should you be packing?

•    Sports socks – Not smart but warm and cosy. Worn with the ubiquitous crocs they can provide full protection against the cold and the lurking nasties to be found on communal bathroom floors.
•    Jog pants – The ‘tracky’ might be low-grade but it’s ultra comforting: on days when you don’t have to appear in public, like essay deadline days, they can be what you wear from waking, through faking, to breaking and calling the campus helpline in tears.
•    Hoodie – Wonderful item, practical, fashionable and totally annoying to lecturers. Don’t invest in the university shop ones though: they mark you out as a fresher and a fool because they cost about twice as much as from anywhere else.
•    Beanie – Great for shoving on when you haven’t washed your hair and you don’t want to give the grunge vibe. Also good for when you decided at 2 am that it was a good idea to shave/dye/straighten your hair and it didn’t work.

The recent case of a badly sunburnt baby whose parents had kept it on Brighton beach all day in inappropriate clothing just goes to show how dangerous the sun can be.  But we all want to enjoy the good weather and children in particular love to be outside when the sun shines. So how do we keep them safe?

Sunshine and clothing

People of any age, with any skin colour, can develop skin cancers but children are five times more likely to suffer sunburn and it’s sunburn that is often linked to development of melanoma skin cancer in later life. The areas where melanoma is most often seen are the face, head and shoulders: areas that can easily be protected by hats and short or long-sleeved T-shirts.

Prevention is better than cure

Try to keep children out of direct sun between eleven and three – let them sit in the shade or even, although it feels wrong, indoors watching cartoons on TV!

A good UV screening T-shirt is thick enough so that when you put your hand inside, you can’t see your skin through the fabric. Anything thinner than that doesn’t offer adequate protection. Clothing choices for children should work with a good waterproof sunscreen to offer maximum safeguard.

Hats help most

In Australia they’ve run a national campaign to encourage parents to put hats on their children. It’s claimed that a child wearing a baseball cap is 78% less likely to suffer sunstroke.

Babies belong in the shade

The latest government advice is that babies under 6 months should be kept completely out of the sun, and should not have sunscreen applied to their skin. This means that your baby should be indoors, under a parasol or – if you have to expose them to the sun – choose baby clothing that covers the entire body such as a long sleeved T-shirt and leggings with a wide-brimmed hat.