It has been a long while since fashion showed any love to the skirt suit. Slouchy trouser suits have recently been rehabilitated; sensible court shoes have made it on to the Vetements catwalk. But the skirt suit – with all its associations of Margaret Thatcher and corporate anonymity – has remained an outfit for which style mavens had little time.

This season, however, that is changing. After decades in the wilderness, the skirt suit is back. At Louis Vuitton, it came with nipped-in, embellished jackets, while Gucci’s was worn slacker-sized, as if scored in a thrift store two sizes too big. At Moschino, it was Jackie Kennedy perky, complete with pillbox hat and – occasionally – a model with a blue face (designer Jeremy Scott, in his wisdom, imagined that Jackie was an alien for AW18). At Erdem, the muse was Adele Astaire, giving rise to an old school tweedy elegance, while Christian Dior’s were checked and a bit beatnik. Eudon Choi’s had a Thatcher-approved double-breasted jacket, while Calvin Klein’s were deconstructed, asymmetric and fashion-complicated.

It makes sense that Chanel excels at the skirt suit trend, this season updating the house’s classic tweed suits with sweaters tied around models’ necks. Coco Chanel, after all, brought skirt suits back into fashion when she relaunched her label in 1953, modelling them herself with strands of pearls and a lazy cigarette at her Rue Cambon atelier. Skirt suits swiftly became a worldwide status symbol that spoke of blue-chip Parisian glamour and a modern, pulled-together woman who had graduated beyond frou frou dresses.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair: Shukeel Murtaza using Bumble and bumble. Makeup: Alexis Day using Pat McGrath Labs. Model: Jiahe Zhang. All clothes and bag: Joseph. Photograph: David Newby/The Guardian

Skirt suits have long been freighted with meaning. In the 30s and 40s, they became the uniform of film noir’s tough broads. Lauren Bacall seduced Bogie in The Big Sleep wearing a skirt suit, while Barbara Stanwyck wore them to carry out her dastardly plan in Double Indemnity. Hitchcock loved them – Marlene Dietrich wore them in Stage Fright, in 1950, while Tippi Hedren was in a skirt suit when she fought off The Birds. Skirt suits can be chipper – when worn by Cher Horowitz in 1995’s Clueless – or part of the darkest moments in history. When Jackie Kennedy wore a pink Chanel-like skirt suit when her husband was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, images of her wearing it, splattered in blood, were beamed around the world.

The skirt suit will, of course, for ever be associated with the 80s. When it became the uniform of the career woman, power-dressing her way into the boardroom. Their icon was Margaret Thatcher, a female anomaly on the political stage, negotiating the scrutiny of the public eye in pearls, that handbag, a Tory blue skirt suit and – to paraphrase Working Girl’s skirt suit wearer Tess McGill – “serious hair”.

Net-a-Porter’s global buying director, Elizabeth von der Goltz, sees the return of skirt suits as part of the return of tailoring, with smartness sneaking back into fashion behind the top-line trends of streetwear. She credits its rise to the increasing prominence of women in business and public life. “We’re lucky enough to live in an age in which women are leaders, and are empowered to make bold and influential decisions, so for me this trend has a lot of significance,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair: Shukeel Murtaza using Bumble and bumble. Makeup: Alexis Day using Pat McGrath Labs. Model: Jiahe Zhang. All clothes and bag: Joseph. Photograph: David Newby/The Guardian

Contemporary skirt suits represent a standard of acceptable, respectable formalwear, worn everywhere from banks to law courts to Westminster, where female MPs, including Theresa May, regularly wear them. Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality party, isn’t a fan. “You’re trying to dress a bit like a man but enough like a woman that you don’t frighten the horses,” she says, “trying to look professional and also female, in a way that is acceptable to very male-dominated workplaces.” Marjorie Strachan, head of inclusion at RBS, is more positive, arguing that the re-emergence of the skirt suit means women have more choice. “Women should be free to be who they are [at work],” she says. “This a great opportunity to wear what they want and be their authentic self. Dress codes are changing. If you walked into Google, I don’t think the first thing you would be looking at is what people are wearing.”

With only one in 10 people now wearing a suit to work, and many of the most powerful people in the world more likely to sport a grey marl hoodie than tailoring, fashion’s adoption of the skirt suit makes even more sense. It is both a symbol of the everyday and slightly nostalgic. London fashion week designer Eudon Choi, for example, is intrigued by the old school power of the look. “We liked the way it looked a bit strange for us, and therefore a bit fresh,” he says. “It’s Lauren Hutton or Meryl Streep – powerful, intellectual, sophisticated.”

These days, then, perhaps a twentysomething in her Silicon Roundabout office can wear a skirt suit with a knowing smirk, rather than choosing it to negate any anxiety about how she’ll fit in when walking into a boardroom full of men. In fact, today’s skirt suit wearer might not wear it to work at all. “It’s no longer a formal, workwear look,” von der Goltz says. “It’s really fun to style and make your own. You can dress it up with a shirt and big statement earrings or look more relaxed with a T-shirt and trainers.” This 24/7 wearability is the ultimate sign that things have changed. A workwear staple out of office hours? That’s the 2018 skirt suit for you.