How to wear summer fringing now

Photography Phillip Waterman www.phillipwaterman.com, stylist Alice Wilby www.futurefrock.co.uk, hair and make up Charlotte Cowen www.charlottecowen.com. There’s no better time to talk fringing than during festival season. And yes, this might seem like the most hackneyed of festie trends, recalling Native American culture and the counterculturalists who adopted these looks as uniform - but check SS14 collections. Some of the coolest designers around used fringing to reference other cultures or to add a dash of the purest rock chick to silhouettes.

Amazons on the catwalk of New York designer Joseph Altuzarra were a case in point. With striped menswear shirts slashed to the waist and straight wraparound skirts trailing long strips of fabric, they looked like impossibly glam office girls dumped on a desert island and taking to the local environment rather well.

Rodarte, brainchild of sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, embraced the global traveller by mixing black fringed skirts, enormous hip slung belts, leopard print dinner jackets – and glittery bra tops. Add silver-tipped winkle pickers and long bleached blonde hair into the mix and you get the picture (trashy, sexy, rodeo girl goes wild).

Back in the Italian corner, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino dressed models in crisp shirts and tailored shorts, over which they slung sumptuous fringed suede ponchos, heavy with bead work. And Japanese designer Junya Watanabe went typically - and gloriously - into another world. His primitive, folkloric women warriors were crowned with feather mohawk headdresses, in layered dresses of complex knotted suede. If there was anywhere to wear this stuff, it would have been Glasto.

If you needed any more proof of how hot the trend is right now, look no further than Kate Moss’ recent collection for Topshop, still in stores. From the sell-out gold cape and white maxi dress to the biker jacket, a good half of the collection seems covered in little strips. After years wearing the world's most beautiful clothes, fashion's ultimate rock chick knows that nothing moves across the body quite like layers upon layers of fringing.

So here I am wearing a bustle jacket by a very talented London-based Chinese designer called Pinghe and a stunning skirt by Queen of Glam Amanda Wakeley. Now I know this is a world away from the beautiful hippies of SS14 - and you're hardly likely to find someone trudging through the mud at a festival in this outfit - but stylist Alice Wilby and I loved the skirt because, with its flirty tiered fringes, it still shows off the look in a slightly formal incarnation. Not quite Glasto but still bang on trend.