Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain

What are your thoughts on coloured jeans for women?

Michelle, by email

I have many thoughts on the matter, none of which are wholly complimentary, In fact, I’d say they are entirely uncomplimentary. Orange? On your legs? Really? Did you intend to do that or did you just spill a family-sized bottle of Orangina down your thighs?

I know that such scepticism is showing my age worse than the concealer crumbling into my crow’s-feet because, as your question insinuates, colourful jeans are what all the cool kids are wearing these days. But listen up, cool kids: when I was a youngster, we had a name for people who wore red trousers. We called them clowns. Ooh, I think I just pulled a Werther’s Original out of my pocket.

I do feel a bit guilty about this sneering, not merely out of selfish vanity (ie, it’s making me look old), but also out of selfless love, because I actually quite like the store behind this colourful denim madness, and that store is Uniqlo.

Y’all know what Uniqlo is because it has spread through this country with the vehemence of swine flu paranoia, if not actually swine flu itself. One minute you had never heard of it, the next it became part of the M&S-Tesco-WH Smiths-Boots-Waterstone’s scaffolding that makes up this country’s high streets. I bought a rather fetching pair of Uniqlo cropped jeans the other day for a mere £15 and I’m pretty sure I can’t hear the screams of Chinese children as I pull them on in the morning.

However … furnishing me with a pair of cropped jeans is no excuse for encouraging the soft and susceptible minds of this country’s youths to wear bright green denim upon their legs. Green legs? What are you, a cricket?

Dear readers, there is nothing wrong with branching out to stand out (ooh, that was kinda catchy, wasn’t it? Perhaps only 1980s advertising executives appreciated it). But the person who buys into this nonsense not only isn’t branching out (because everyone is doing it, they are merely following the high-street trend, like a Technicolor sheep), they are therefore not standing out, either. The only thing they are doing is committing violence to my eyeballs.

Even worse, Uniqlo has now hired to star in its advertising campaign the one thing that is perhaps more ubiquitous on this planet than coloured denim: come on down, Agyness Deyn! (Alexa Chung must have been too busy being photographed at another fashion party. Amazing that she has time to change her penny loafers with such a hectic schedule, don’t you think?)

Even aside from their shared ubiquity, it is a pairing that makes sense in that a) both the trend and the model seem to have confused “being fashionable” with “being wacky – wheeeee!”; b) they both baffle me.

And now, not only are people wearing coloured jeans, they are wearing them, Agyness-style, with a trilby, a man’s blazer, spats and probably jigging their legs about, like marionettes.

Sticking with this Hornby-esque list technique, here are some handy tips on how y’all can stand out without having to wear orange on your legs:

1. Don’t wear jeans.

2. Don’t wear anything the mannequins are wearing in the front window of a high-street shop.

3. Don’t wear anything worn by a celebrity, especially if you don’t understand why that celebrity is famous.

No applause, just monetary expressions of gratitude, please.

I recently spotted a pair of floral leggings in Topshop. Am I, a thirtysomething woman, now officially too old for Topshop?

Charlotte, London

Charlotte, you seem to see floral leggings as redolent of Daisy Lowe-style youthful fashion; I see them as something my grandmother’s bridge-playing friends might have sported in Miami. But fashion, of course, is subjective, so let’s focus on the bigger picture of your question and that is of the age limit of Topshop and fashion age limits in general.

In regards to the former, the whole Topshop experience has always been largely based on wheat and chaff and sorting the former from the latter. As one gets older, more sorting is required, not because you are too old to wear certain things, but because you are too wise to do so.

But leaving that aside, this page hates hates HATES this idea of people being too old to wear certain things, as though clothes are films with age-specific certificates, but in reverse. Did I mention that I hate them? It is just another way to make women feel bad about not weighing eight stone and being 21 years old. And the fact that the D*i*y M*i* actually has a column on its fashion pages called “Am I Too Old to …” proves how stupid it is. In fact, upsetting people at that so-called newspaper is actually a pretty good reason to wear a rah-rah skirt. I am woman. Hear me rah.

• Post questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9GU. Email: ask.hadley@guardian.co.uk