Scary fashion trends to try: You - yes you - can wear orange

Orange coats are so in right now.

Orange is the colour of easyJet, prison jumpsuits, the Netherlands, fish fingers and obviously oranges. As a pasty person, I always avoided orange because it’s this bold, traffic light, look-at-me colour. It’s the same thinking insecure brides use to justify putting their bridesmaids in horrible polyester peach dresses: they don’t want to be outshone by something that’s meant to be on their team. Instead I admired 50 shades of orange from afar, silently giving an approving nod to those courageous individuals totally pulling off burnt embers, marmalades and even rave party neon at 1pm on a Tuesday.

But then February 2016 rolled around and a weird thing happened. The weather had suddenly decided to give us a parting blast of winter and dropped the temperature by 10 degrees. Suddenly, orange was everywhere. Specifically orange coats. Classy macs, padded parkas, trendy cocoons, even capes. Camouflaged among everyone else who went for the sensible, goes-with-everything navy coat at the first bite of winter, I watched these colourful mavericks nonchalantly hopping on buses and strolling the streets, no doubt going somewhere fabulous and exciting in their attention-grabbing gear that defied the grey drizzle.

In 1957 this guy called James Vicary claimed that flashing the words ‘EAT POPCORN’ at people in a cinema more than doubled sales of the snack. A lot of people weren’t having this and he was accused of being a fraud, but probably most of us can admit that at some point we’ve found ourselves buying or thinking about something because we’ve been battered with adverts for it. (I bet you haven't thought about fish fingers in years...) That’s how orange worked for me. Seeing so many people embracing what I always thought was a trend reserved for people who know without googling how to pronounce Moschino (it's a ck not a shh, apparently) spurred me on to open my wardrobe and my heart to this shade.

The final push was seeing my sister Claire casually slipping on a super smart orange mac, the colour of sharon fruit (an actual fruit, not a person). I’ve been hanging on to her fashion coattails since we were kids and she cut up old Tammy Girl socks as sweatbands (trust me, it was all the rage in the early 2000s), so somehow this served as a final tick against the phrase ‘Orange as clothes?’

And then I met the orange jumper. In a last ditch attempt to prove to myself that orange, like cocaine and potholing, was best left to other people, I grabbed a random orange jumper from the men’s section of H&M. And the bastard fit. And, worse, instead of draining my skin of any remaining rosiness like a colour-sucking leech, it actually made me look more alive. It pointed to the bit of pink in my cheeks and went 'Hey, look at this!' It made my eyes look a little bit more blue. It was the wingman my wardrobe had been waiting for.

The ‘money’ part of my brain managed to wrestle the ‘fashion’ and ‘but I want it’ parts down and run away without it, but they launched a war of attrition over the next few weeks. Unfortunately my office is within a lunchtime walking distance of three H&Ms. After visiting the jumper two more times, it ended up on a coat hanger in my packed-out closet.

It didn't stay there. We’re still in the honeymoon phase of showing each other off on strolls along Southbank on sunny weekends and in smug photos on my Twitter profile. We snuggle up for Parenthood binges on rainy evenings. I’m planning on introducing it to more aspects of my life soon, but for now we're finding out what works for us (ice cream necklace: yes; burgundy hat: no).

What I learned from years of being a distant orange admirer and a few weeks of coming out in wild support was that your own personal style needs to be fluid. Sometimes fashion risks strike out. Like that phase when I wore nothing but baby blue tracksuit bottoms with Tammy Girl slogan t-shirts (the early 2000s was a good time for that shop but a bad time for fashion). But if something catches your eye on other people, it's worth being bold.