Susannah Shops: The allure of pink

Pink jeans are the thing this season, apparently: in candyfloss and loose-fitting, with a low, laced waistline at Isabel Marant and skinny in lightweight hot-pink courtesy of J Brand.

Pink, perhaps weirdly, is a colour that more than a few fashion followers generally attracted to a more sober palette – that'll be me, then – dream of wearing. Miuccia Prada once told me that the conservative and predominantly navy-blue nature of her dress-code, as dictated to her by her mother when she was a child, led to a yearning to one day wear pink.

The Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo – a woman, let's not forget, who almost single-handedly made black a fashion cliché throughout the Eighties and Nineties – also loves pink. Pink frills, pink gingham. True, I've never actually seen her wearing it, but the archetypally feminine colour clearly has a place in her heart. And in mine.

"Am I too old to wear hot-pink J Brand jeans?" I ask a colleague on the fashion desk. (I don't tell her that it's too late, because I already have them.)

"If you were my mum I'd say so," she replies, which isn't entirely encouraging. "But you're a fashion editor so you can wear anything." And how great, I ask you, is that?

A man on a nearby sub-editing desk clearly doesn't think so. "Shut up – I hate you!" he mouths, in full view of our gaze. A case of sour grapes? He wouldn't be able to wear pink jeans like I can, I reckon. No way.

So I try them. While I do have to admit that my legs are now reminiscent of crab sticks, and that Reversy Percy – a hero in the sweet drawer but hardly a fashion icon – also springs to mind, I'm not letting that put me off. There's something uplifting about wearing such an unashamedly whimsical colour. And as I'm a fashion editor, I can wear anything, you see.

s.frankel@independent.co.uk