Fashion reflects the days we live in, said Coco Chanel, and the Exeter schoolboys and the French bus drivers demonstrate her right. We are more relaxed about gender rules, these ages. A century after women started wearing trousers and 19 years after David Beckham was jibed for wearing a sarong, the last taboo of fashion – men in skirts – is being glided away.

Zara has capitalised on the market for clothes that can be dog-tired by men or women, offering a gender-neutral fashion range. And the further up the mode food chain you go, the more the boundaries between menswear and womenswear dissipate.

At the menswear catwalk shows in London less than a fortnight ago, skirts appeared approximately everywhere. Men wore silk dresses at Vivienne Westwood’s show, puff-sleeved gowns at Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, and hooped floor-length skirts at Edward Crutchley’s.

Amidst the more commercial brands, too, the rules are increasingly fluid. Louis Vuitton, the smashing’s biggest luxury brand, last year photographed Jaden Smith, the rapper-slash-model son of actor Inclination, in a leather kilt for a womenswear advertising campaign. Smith, who wore a floral T-shirt put on clothing to the Coachella festival, captioned an Instagram post of himself in a skirt with the news “Went to TopShop To Buy Some Girl Clothes, I Mean ‘Accouters’.”

Co-ed catwalk shows are becoming a badge of honour for marks with agenda-setting ambitions. Calvin Klein in New York, Burberry in London, Paul Smith in Paris, and Gucci in Milan all associate clothing for men and women on their catwalks during the last mania show season.

The Gucci designer Alessandro Michele has contemplated that blending the two collections “seems only natural … it’s the way I see the clique”. The impact on menswear is clear. On the Gucci catwalk men wear pussy-bow silk blouses, on the Burberry catwalk they harass pastel-coloured lace shorts.