Katy Guest: Clothes are also required when wearing tights

Don't get me started...

I may be to fashion what Cheryl Cole is to the Wigan annual pie-eating contest, but there's something I find very worrying about the current trend for tights as outerwear. Don't get me wrong: I find tights generally rather creepy, especially when they are worn under playsuits by women at music festivals who are obviously going to wee down their legs before they ever get into a portable loo. But to be fair to grown women who wear playsuits in public, (let's break the habit of a lifetime), at least they are wearing clothes. And maybe there's something weirdly satisfying about knowing that your burgeoning thrush colony will soon have its own military.

What's even stranger is that this winter, women are walking around in just a shirt, coat, tights and boots, as if they are all trapped in horrible dreams in which they have accidentally come into work without their skirts on. Do they ever catch their reflections in shop windows and suddenly realise that they're walking the streets in their underwear? Is there nobody at home who could have told them before they came out? Don't they have mirrors?

I can't decide which is worse: the new tights-with-stockings-printed-on which they are now selling in Marks & Spencer, and which offer all the sluttiness of on-show stocking tops combined with all the sweatiness of fusty polyester; or old-school woolly ones with visible reinforced gussets.

At least the latter are items that you would expect to find in M&S, which used to pride itself on keeping British women warm, lifted and separated and not looking like very forgetful prostitutes. And yes, I appreciate that Cheryl wore all-visible stripy tights on The X Factor, but she was at least on stage (not on the bus) at the time, and even she looked like a confused zebra with its pants on over its hosiery.

I don't know why they do it, but I think it might be girls' revenge for all those years they've had to look at boys with their trousers slung round their hips, showing off the saggy grey undercrackers that were bought for them by their mums.

The important thing to remember, though, is that you must never, ever point out to these people what they're wearing. After all, it might be fashion, and then just think how silly you'd look.