I’ve always been too pale to get a proper tan.  When I was younger, I’d look upon my friends with envy; the girls who would return to school in September after weeks of beach-lazing with feint outlines around the ankles, wrist or shoulders - a demarcation of where the sun couldn’t reach. 

Their tan lines made them seem so grown up, dangerous almost. It was as though they suddenly knew far more about life than me. In the PE changing rooms, my friends would proudly show off the gauzy patches of pale skin on their hips, arguing who had baked their skin the shade of an oak dresser best of all. I would instinctively cover my transluscent pale, freckly skin, believing that one day I’d suddenly usurp them all by developing a remarkable and sudden ability to go Cindy Crawford  bronze in the sun. Of course, I never did.

Even my older sister had a healthy aptitude for tanning, revealing swimsuit marks on her shoulders on the day of our Mum’s wedding in ‘94. Those bands of white flesh did detract somewhat from the grandeur of our bespoke raspberry pink bridesmaid dresses but she shrugged them off with the casual nonchalance that she’s since become known for. 

"Exposed tan lines balk in the face of accepted laws of grooming"

As an adult, I switched teams – suddenly claiming to prefer my Celtic paleness and refusal to jump on the tanning wagon (faux or otherwise). But, despite outwardly bemoaning the uncouth, sloppiness of tan lines, they represent something quite cool and rebellious in my mind. They are an oblique rejection of order and contrition. They are smudged mascara, chipped red nail polish, bed hair and overgrown highlights. They balk in the face of accepted laws of grooming and there’s something about that that feels like a new idea once more. And it’s for this very reason that I think tan lines are due a summer 2014 reprisal.

Of course, like countless other organic beauty trends, it all started with Rihanna. More than once this year, she’s been photographed with the very real silhouette of a bikini imprinted on her skin. Now, it has to be said; Rihanna is no wallflower when it comes to revealing some skin, but what’s she’s also pretty damn good at is pre-empting future beauty trends. Finger tattoos? Rihanna. Temporary blingy grill? Rihanna. Undercut? Rihanna. Stiletto-length round, pointy nails? Rihanna. 

Tan lines are a bit gauche, really; they’re the skin equivalent of bearing a huge Versace logo across your T-shirt, or a Louis Vuitton logo across your tote. They are signifiers of either absent-mindedness or ‘I don’t give a sh**ness’, both of which intimate a certain laissez faire attitude to beauty this summer. We’re powering down on the mascara, we’ve stowed away the curling irons and toying with a foundation-free complexion. Tan lines imply a sense of the carpe diem in beauty terms; we’re ready to just let it be.

A cultural barometer, like hemlines or hair lengths, the visual marker of a tan has waxed and waned in terms of its general popularity. When, as a nation, we’re feeling vulnerable and exposed, we retract, regroup and emerge altogether more staid and sobered, aesthetically. Now, as we seem to finally be making some headway in scratching our way out of total and utter financial collapse, we’re open to having fun again with our looks, breaking some rules. 

And though this season’s catwalks were awash with pale, androgynous boy-girls with pale, androgynous skin, without any semblance of the gazelle-like toned and glossed limbs that have frequented catwalks past, there was a decided allegiance to the idea of a warm, moneyed tan itself. At Donna Karan, make-up artist, Charlotte Tilbury bronzed the faces of Karlie Kloss and Joan Smalls to recall the golden age (excuse the pun) of taking beach holidays in the 70s. The result was opulent, exuberant and expensive rather than overtly reality TV show tan. 

It’s a total coincidence of course, but the recent reshowing of The Graduate, in which a topless and tan-lined Anne Bancroft seduces a terrified and hapless Dustin Hoffman crystallised the tan line thing for me. Somehow, it gave her lithe  body a realness; a presence, a marker of history, those pale strips of skin stretching up and across her clavicles indicated that she’d been on holiday, sunbathing in a bikini and the merest inference of this, oddly as opposed to all-too perfect nakedness of a bronzed body without tan lines, it lent the scene a naughtiness and Bancroft a sense of playful youth, of course making her totally irresistible to Hoffman.

Bancroft’s tan lines, a vision which has no doubt been imprinted on the minds of a million middle-aged men, has since become an iconic filmic motif, made even more so when Tom Ford paid homage to it in his 2010 eyewear campaign, starring a very Anne Bancroft-esque Carolyn Murphy, with her rambunctious hair and sunkissed St Tropez skin, draped over a rather young-looking Nicholas Hoult. The campaigns did big things for Tom Ford’s glasses and aptly recalled the playful risqué campaigns Tom Ford spearheaded for Gucci a decade previously – again, visions of naughtiness and unapologetic sex appeal with a touch of the objectionable.

There seems to be a socio-cultural shift too: the obsessive beach-burkini days seem to be on the wane; we know very well the danger of prolonged sun exposure but we also know very well how to adequately protect ourselves from it as well as that some vitamin D is good for us. And so the pendulum swings; tans, the motif of a life well-lived, proof of the luxury of travel, which is proof – by extension – of the luxury of time, an entity that in these ravenously overworked times, is as precious as gold dust. 

I might have come round to the idea of exposed tan lines but sadly, it doesn’t alter the fact that my skin and the sun do not a happy companionship make. This is one sub-trend that I’ll have to enjoy from afar. I’ve got Rihanna for that.