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.

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.

There’s a good article on how Fashion Week fashion ends up on the high street over at MSN and it’s important because for those on a budget who want to, or have to, look good, understanding the process from catwalk to casual clothing helps pick out what counts, and what doesn’t.

If you’re in an industry where fashion matters: fashion itself, media, graphic design, art etc, what you wear can say a lot about you and how you fit in. So recognising key details such as colour and cut can help you pick out trends to invest in that mark you as a trend setter, not a slouch.

Colours, such as this year’s hot tip of mustard are crucial. But you don’t have to invest in a new mustard coloured leather jacket like those seen at Prada’s show – just get a mustard coloured vest or T-shirt and wear it under your existing shirts, zip up hoodies and jackets: instant trend for a few pounds rather than a month’s disposable income.

Watch hairstyles too – if every male model has slicked back hair, you can bet that the look is going to be appearing in soap operas and teen band videos in within weeks, and then in your local barbers before the end of the year.

One of this year’s big features is sportswear with sports hair – that means technical clothing in bright colours and tousled hair that’s also ‘bright’ in other words with strong outdoor colours such as racing blond highlights, diver-style wet look curls and boxing ring razored back layers worn with grey hoodies and sweatshirts.

Joleon Lescott is in discussions with Manchester City over a proposed line in casual clothing aimed at twenty something fans of fashion and sport. Since taking part in Shay Givens Fashion Kicks event last year, Lescott seems to have focused strongly on developing a fashion identity that could be turned into a brand. He’s not alone, David Beckham is perhaps the most famous of the British players to create a clothing line, and a perfume, but Rio Ferdinand has had success too.

So what’s the Lescott look likely to be, and how do you get it without paying designer prices?

One rumour is that the new brand will feature his distinctive scar (from a car accident as a five year old boy) as a trademark, although that seems unlikely, however it may feature as a line art design on vest T-shirts that seem to be one of his favourite garments, and while the clothing will probably feature Man City colours at least in the first couple of years he tends towards grey, black and red as a clothing palette. Sportswear will be a big feature if the line goes ahead, and we can expect to see pale blue, grey and black vests, maybe with that scar as a watermark style print on the front, along with hoodies and track trousers.

If you want the look, aim to buy vests, maybe getting them printed with your name in a gothic tattoo style, or with a scar emblem if you, like Lescott, have such a feature, and focus on combining vests with more formal jackets or hoodies with designer denim and boots, to get the luxe sports look that Lescott is likely to aim for.

In a cautionary tale, American high school basketball has just had a minor infringement of rules become a major national debating point, all because of the colour of some T-shirts. It’s Make-A-Wish week in the USA and loads of people are taking part in charitable fundraising, just as we do here for Red Nose Day or Children In Need. At Burke High School (Nebraska) the team decided to wear pink – the Make-A-Wish colour – instead of the classic white home uniform and to auction off the uniform tops afterwards to raise funds for the charity. Their competitors, Columbus Discoverers, wore red away tops.

At half-time, one of the Columbus management team raised a formal complaint, saying that the uniform worn by Burke did not comply with league rules and no advance warning of a uniform change had been given. As a result, a technical foul was given against the home team who were one point in the lead at the half time break.

It’s the kind of question that’s arising a lot in sport at present – what’s honourable, what’s acceptable, when are rules enforced and when not? Is it okay not to shake hands with another player? Is it okay to change uniform clothing for a good cause without consulting others involved? What kind of language is acceptable in the heat of the moment during a sporting crisis?

Basically, the basketball officials had no choice but to award the foul once the matter was brought to their attention and the final result, 62-47 to Columbus, made it really insignificant that they’d pointed out the infringement. But it’s worth always bearing in mind, whether you play for a local 5-a-side football team that wears jerseys and one day decides to move to V-necked T-shirts or organise vests for a local running club, that there are often rules about sports clothing that need to be understood and observed and raising money for charity is not considered an adequate reason for breaking them.

This year is Olympic year and there’s no doubt that London will be packed with people wearing sporting gear, even if they are not, themselves, sporty. Designers are clearly being influenced by the combination of Cool Britannia and sporting fever, and designers such as Lacoste, Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors are all getting hot under the collar.

Performance fabrics, such as poly-cottons or poly-elastic-cottons are very much in evidence along with sports styling such as ultra-long vests worn over leggings for women and layered T-shirts in primary colours for men.

A lot of dropped crotch cotton trousers turned up on the catwalk again in the spring collections, and it will be interesting to see if they actually make it into the high street this year – last year the harem pant style was very much in evidence in the collections but not very prevalent in the shops.

One difference this year is in colour. While male luxe sportswear is still focused on bright colours, the female palette is much more subtle, with bronze, grey, heather, cream and stone appearing as basic tones. This makes dressing in luxe sports clothing much more accessible to the average women both financially and in terms of body shape. While most of us can’t contemplate pearl coloured leggings and a sheer panelled vest, we can imagine wearing a gold or silver vest or camisole, under a grey zip-up hoody, with dark jeans or leggings. To get the look, focus on a good leather slouch bag, or even better, a leather backpack which looks properly sporty and consider jogging bottoms worn with heels, ‘sporty’ hairstyles like pig-tails tied with wool, gymnast-style, and neon detailing like earrings and shoe-laces.

Starre Varten, author of the Eco-Chick Guide to Life, writing at Mother Nature Network poses the question – is it acceptable now to wear pyjamas all day?

Surely not. And yet the trend for stay at home mums to turn up at the school gate in their nightwear is increasing, and teens have been seen shopping on Sundays in their PJs.

Of course the trend towards casual clothing has accelerated, and women now feel completely comfortable to walk around all day in leggings and yoga pants, where a few years ago such clothing would have been gym attire only. And as Varten points out, casual clothing breaks down class and income distinctions and allows everybody to be treated equally. In the days when rich people dressed one way and poor another, social distinctions were clearly made on sight – now that we all wear jeans and T-shirts, even the President of the USA (on his days off) wears hoodies, we’re told – we all have the opportunity to interact without barriers created by clothing judgements.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt that overly casual attire will still lead to social isolation. The mothers who don’t get out of their sleepwear to collect their children from school may struggle to obtain employment or other opportunities when they seek them if their habit of dressing down has become ingrained because it can suggest to others that these are people who have no interest in achievement and little desire to emulate others.

So where do we draw the line? The answer may be simple – don’t wear your PJs in the street, instead, wear your streetwear to bed! A camisole top and shorts, for women, or short sleeved T-shirt and shorts for men, can be as comfortable as nightwear and if you really can’t be bothered to change your clothes, allows you to leave the house without earning yourself a reputation for idleness.

The weather is unpredictable and driving can become unpredictable too … whether we’re a passenger or a driver, it’s vital to be prepared for changeable weather and poor road conditions, particularly because traffic police suggest that during bad weather the majority of collisions would have been preventable with better preparation.

The first thing is to remember that speed limits on road signs are maximum ones, set for ideal road conditions when the surface is dry and the temperatures are warm. Slick surfaces require a longer stopping distance and poor visibility can result in collisions.

Top tips for safe driving include:

1. Checking road and weather conditions before departure and, if necessary, postponing travel.
2. Ensuring the vehicle has enough fuel to reach the destination with some to spare for detours.
3. Taking a mobile phone, blankets, food and water and sensible clothing is essential – remember that you may need layers to keep you warm and then allow you to cool down as temperatures change.
4. A winter jacket in a high vis colour may be a life-saver in poor weather if somebody has to leave the vehicle to put out a warning triangle.
5. If you do have to leave a vehicle, and it’s never recommended, then keeping warm and dry is vital: warm hats, high visibility clothing and gloves and socks with good thermal properties will allow people to keep their body temperature at appropriate levels while out in the weather.
6. Take a clockwork torch so that you can use it if you have to leave the vehicle, and remember to pack a first aid kit in the body of the vehicle so that any small problems can be taken care of without having to pull off the road and open the boot.