What I'm Wearing: Berry colours Colour and culture: an autumnal refresher course. Every winter, if you're someone who writes about fashion for a living, people are wont to ask you what the fashionable colour is. It's an occupational hazard. And every winter you used to have to tell them it was black. That was an occupational hazard too. But now, I can happily report that the all-black rule has, for the moment, lifted. Instead something truly radical has happened: there's now an all-berry law on the statute books. It's a nice colour. Or rather it's a nice range, or family, or palette of colours. Dark and rich without being sombre or morose, with lots of Pavlovian associations (crumble, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's cheeks) berry shades can't help but make you feel all cosy inside and ready to embrace the atrocious weather that is surely headed our way. Beauty how to: berry lips Another boon: creatively speaking, you can have some fun with them. This winter's massive paradigm shift is not to wear berry with something neutral like camel or grey, but to drench yourself in it head to toe. If you scan any glossy woman's magazine you'll see examples of the drenched genre. However, on behalf of the cranberry juice industry, I feel I must dissent from this rash suggestion. It really is a terrible idea, especially if topped off with berry-hued tights. Berry (aka claret, wine, bordeaux and plum) is much more interesting when contrasted with mustards, khakis and teals which, as it so happens, are also much in favour. If you're unused to experimenting, this psychedelic new world may sound terrifying. I don't know why. If a colour mix doesn't set your own teeth on edge, the chances are it won't set anyone else's. You may even find yourself hailed as a genius. And, as with finding the right partner, you usually know when you've hit on a humdinger of a mix. But in case you're a bit rusty, here are some groups that go especially well together: olive/khaki/lime and navy; orange/white/teal and navy; fuchsia/purple/orange; black/camel and white; chocolate/saffron and bottle green... ...At least, they look good together this year. For just as specific colours go in and out of favour, so do specific combinations. The Seventies was the era of sludge and fudge, soft browns, burnt oranges, olive greens; the Eighties favoured simplistic contrasts: grey and pink, blue and yellow. The Nineties and early noughties were all about white and black. No wonder it's taken us so long to build our colour confidence again. Left to right: Ports 1961 autumn/winter 2012. Suit jacket £285, trousers £165 and blouse £135, all Gerard Darel; gerarddarel.com PHOTOS: VLADIMIR POTOP/GERARD DAREL But a sense of colour it seems, can be honed and refined. In his book Through the Language Glass, the linguistics expert Guy Deutscher explains how his baby daughter, in common with many children, failed to identify the sky as blue. Deutscher argues that's because it isn't; really it's clear, with wisps of white. In most cultures, Deutscher explains, blue is the last colour to be identified, because it's so rare in nature. Some cultures still have so little need to refer to blue other than by pointing at the sea, that they make no oral distinctions between blue and green. Homer barely refers to blue at all in the Iliad, a curious anomaly that led William Ewart Gladstone, when he wasn't governing Britain or rescuing fallen women, to write Homer and the Homeric Age, a lengthy tome suggesting, among other things, that the ancient Greeks were colour blind. What I'm Wearing: a minimalist coat Gladstone's theory was widely shared at the time. It wasn't simply the absence of blue in Homer that prompted this conclusion, but his many odd references to violet-coloured sheep and green honey. Ophthalmologists were drafted in to confirm that there was indeed a vital flap missing from the Hellenic cornea. Red, on the other hand, is one of the first colours absorbed into every single world language. It is after all, the colour of danger, of berries - and of this coat. Isn't language brilliant?