This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Last month, I lamented the tenacity with which fashion’s motley assembly of borecores are drably lingering on. Post September’s catwalks, there’s been some talk about a vibe shift into more fascinating fields.

By June, a palate-cleansing tastelessness may abound in the form of ruffled bralettes, python-print knickers, transparency and micro minis.

However, for now, a general lack of flourish prevails, featuring the same, dullsville uniform that has been around for — like — ever. Viz: jeans, an oversized jacket or trench coat, trainers or loafers, typically sported with a cap, all played out in shades of sludge.

Even that colossus of innovation, Miuccia Prada, has offered more of the same, only with the model hunched, as in Miu Miu’s current ad campaign. For who amongst us is not hunched in the face of these unremittingly high-fibre classics?

M’learned pal Anna Murphy of The Times proposes a “scoat”, or boxy coat-cum-jacket with an integrated scarf, as a point of difference, as conceived by cult brand Toteme two winters ago (Embroidered Scarf Jacket, £810, toteme.com), since replicated by M&S (Textured Detachable Scarf Wrap Coat, £75) et al.

Her colleague, Harriet Walker, opines: “It’s around now, just after the shows and before winter has fully hit, that people most ask what they should be buying to see them through the next six months.”

Increasingly my response is “the same as last year” and “nothing”, but this year I am answering “a good bit of grey knitwear”. Instead of the hackneyed adult uniform, go school uniform!

These represent cunning, fash-pack copy opps, rather than anything new and revolutionary. I get it: we’re saving the planet, and this is a 1066 and All That “Good Thing”. But, do we have to resemble robotic drudges whilst doing it?

I bored designer Nick Ashley, son of the late great Laura, the other day, by exploding with gobbing rage on the theme: “These nippers blame ‘the algorithm’ for the fact that they all look the same, but no one’s forcing them to be such fucking lemmings.” After which, I flounced home and sold my trench coat, so ardent was my desire to resist.

What can we do? “It’s the fashion,” as my Brummie grandmother used to shrug philosophically. Here’s what: the one form of flamboyant, vaguely theatrical relief this winter?

It’s boots, bitches, and not some quotidian ankle version, but a knee, or — better still — thigh-high incarnation full of swaggering, pantomime-villain gusto. Fendi, Gucci, Chloé and Ann Demeulemeester all showed boots of piratical tallness, creeping toward the knicker. Even exorbitant minimalists The Row boast £4,060 toffee-coloured incarnations.

Ironically, these were actually my school uniform. In that — in the sixth form — we could wear what we wanted, and what I wanted was the £60, black, suede, thigh-boots modelled by Jeny Howorth in the pages of the recently-launched British Elle.

Flat-soled, held aloft by elastic garters, I sported them with jet mini-skirts, teamed with flouncy, Edwardian blouses.

This didn’t quite fit the brief of “something you might wear in an office job”, but, since I never made it to an office job, no loss there.

My younger sister also wore said stunners at school, playing smouldering bad boy Wickham in an all-girl production of Pride and Prejudice. This spurred a sapphic frenzy in which fellow pupils would leave her love notes and steal her hair ribbon, screaming with Beatlemania-style lust whenever she took the stage.

This is to say, the best thigh boots aren’t whorecore, Pretty Woman sexy; they’re hot as Hades dashing à la Errol Flynn versus Basil Rathbone in 1935’s Captain Blood.

They’re also a bugger to get right, thus a worthy receptacle for sartorial OCD. Over-the-knee numbers have a Goldilocks quality: a lot of trying for size ahead of “just right”.

The ones I am pashing on carry the fairy-tale theme into Cinderella territory as I am contemplating amputation to don HEWI’s Reformation Black Leather Knee-high Boots (£225, hardlyeverwornit.com). Fabulously lofty, elegant of foot, passado-allowing of height, these are the nonpareil. Anyone less bulbous of heel, please acquire and wear on my behalf.

This foot fail destroys me because I long to go panto, despite being scarred by annual visits as a nipper. “It’s 20 miles to London, Dick, and not a puss in sight,” purred Danny La Rue, the hysterical mirth that met such declarations more mystifying than any sexual reference.

It’s not the dame’s crystals I crave, nor the heroine’s tulle, but the Captain Hook/Puss in Boots rig-out. Yawncore be damned.