You can tell a lot about a label from what people wear to its show. At MaxMara, a herd of camel coats took their seats, worn not in the fangirl street style sense of next-season-now status markers but because this heritage label high fashion for real life.

MaxMara clothes are investment pieces – the suit you'll wear for decades, the Claire Underwood coat you aspire to throughout your twenties and eventually buy in your thirties.

And that inheritance has made the design team here ever more adept at reinventing the wheel, as it were. Autumn 2014 felt at once new and reassuringly familiar.

The 'utilitarian luxe' trademark was blended with a bit of Balmoral boho, into something part Vita Sackville-West, part Virgin Suicides. Houndstooth, tartan and Prince of Wales check were banded into stripes on quilted gilets and Paddington-esque coats that took the huntin', shootin', fishin' archetype and made it feel slicker and citified.

The signature blanket coats and minimal trenches came in this gentrified grunge palette but also in camel too, toughened up with patent belts. Elsewhere that Land Girl Gone Wild look inspired heather and Lincoln green herringbone tweed, inlaid with gold textured leather panels, and with matching gold booties more suited to urban hipsters than country hiking.

There was even a nod to street culture in a logo-check take on argyle, rendered in denim blue tailored midi skirts, and layered in threes with long-line ribbed mohair tunics and yet more fur-trimmed puffa tweeds.

It felt stylised but wearable, comfortably both current and classic – alienating none but accessible to a tribe the label hasn't yet tapped. And best of all, besides being cool, it'd also keep you warm, making these some of the most perfectly persuasive investment pieces around. Your mum would approve – she might even try to copy your look.