This autumn’s trend goes beyond fashion as women of all ages dare to wear animal print to give them an edge

There are trends, the seasonal diktats that filter down from the catwalks and on to the high street, and then there is the mass proliferation of an idea so big that it transcends fashion. Welcome to the zoo! In this, the autumn of 2018, leopard print is no longer just a look – it has become a bona fide movement.

Cast an eye around your local pub, work do or big night out and consider the safari-load of animal prints on show: cheetah, snake, tiger and yes, the sleekest of them all: the leopard. Where before coats and shoes had the fashion monopoly on animal prints, allowing women to gently accessorise their way to the jungle, now entire wardrobes are rotating around animal skirts, animal shirts, animal tights and animal shoes. Sometimes bravely, sometimes brilliantly, all at once.

Soaring sales of animal print clothing helped Asos post a £500m rise in sales last year, the firm revealed last week. The online fashion retailer sold 1.3 million animal print garments across both menswear and womenswear, offering 2,000 options during the period.

Of course, the fashion lot has been telling us this for months: leopard print never really went away. But thanks to the February shows in which Tom Ford’s sublime collection led the pack, a roaring trade (sorry) was to be expected for the colder months. And so Réalisation’s leopard Naomi skirt became “the most viral clothing piece of the year”. Reformation, & Other Stories and Zara have been selling out of their leopard-y pieces week in, week out. Guides on how to correctly clash your animal patterns were churned out by the industry all summer long.

I see the eye roll, I hear the scoff: who cares? Women have gone wild; we’re dressed as a collective pack; it’s “just” fashion; move on.

But let’s paws for thought (sorry, again). Usually, once a look has been so thoroughly mainstreamed (and there is more to come – we’re far from peak animal print yet) it would be declared dead and over by the editors, bloggers, influencers and fashion buyers who have helped make it so chic, so desirable. Not so for animal power. Everyone seems to be wearing it: the older, the younger, the cool, the less-so. More is more, but why?

In Fierce: The History of Leopard Print (Harper Design), the author and burlesque expert Jo Weldon runs through a potted history explaining the allure of animal skin from the post-war 1920s to Dynasty and Debbie Harry’s 1980s – a cycle of glamour, trashiness, transgression and back. To Weldon, it is obvious why women would keep coming back to spots and stripes. “The pattern designed to help these dangerous animals blend in [to their environments] was one that a woman used to stand out,” she notes. And so this woman is “not necessarily saying that she is a predator, but she sure isn’t prey.”

At a time when female sexuality, power and vulnerability have never been more talked about, there is a comfort in this subtle, subconscious subversion: no matter how many times you read a fashion editor coolly declaring that leopard skin is now a wardrobe neutral akin to a black polo neck or blue denim jeans, animal print retains a gratifying edge. In his 1954 manual, The Little Dictionary of Fashion, Christian Dior famously wrote that “to wear leopard you must have a kind of femininity which is a little bit sophisticated. If you are fair and sweet, don’t wear it.” And so the connotations have always been that it’s sexy, a bit raunchy, a bit daring, a bit wild.

Class and money complicate things further: Mrs Robinson allegedly gave it a pussycat allure while Pat Butcher was seen to make it common. Now’s the time to rewrite the rules and own it being both.

Yes, women can wear leopard-print blouses to the office and claw down raised eyebrows. No, they don’t have to stick to the demure flashes of animal skin on shoes, handbags or a well-wrapped scarf. It is a print that has gone beyond being a current fashion statement to establishing itself as a wardrobe perennial. Elegant, knowing, arch – and as stylishly savage as it gets.