At Stella McCartney this morning, there was Soul II Soul on the playlist and sports luxe on the catwalk.

This wasn't done in the label's usual athletic vein - instead the designer, who took her bow with her children, had a streetwear and rap culture focus for autumn - oversized and grandiloquent, summed up by Cara Delevingne and Joan Smalls crip-walking down the runway at the end of the show.

There were fleecy woollen coats, uptown but urchin in cut with a DIY embellishment made of zips snaking around mannish jackets and bigged-up knitwear covered in quilted swirls of the same pattern.

A digitised rusty-looking patina print decorated voluminous parkas and anoraks; mountaineering toggles became an elegant and sportif means of giving silhouette to baggier styles; and shoes were a take on hiking boots, with geisha-esque wooden platforms (all sustainable, of course).

Meanwhile, tailoring was also broadly masculine in shape, but the dimensions here were dialled down - the fit was slick and snug but anything as formal as business-like negated by sleeves tied around waists. They were printed with sort of digital tie dye, in keeping with Michigan-cum-Madchester looks seen earlier on.

McCartney seemed to be making a point both to and for her customers here - as we've seen elsewhere, most recently at Acne but also at Topshop Unique for spring. That, as Noughties youths mine the 90s for their own purposes, the now-tamed original ravers reclaim it as their own new version of elegance.

There's no need to cast off the comfort or the cool of your heyday as you grow up; as McCartney reworks her life according to kids and a mortgage, so she can re-style yours.

It's a fabulously clever and culturally aware direction to take. And it's strange how long it has take for fashion's status quo to shift: if women want to wear parkas and sloppy knits and trainers (or even these hiking shoes) then shelve the twinsets and offer these to them. There's no logic to a fashion show that takes the dictates of the 50s, or even the 80s, and sticks to them.

If women want to cleave to the uniform of their youth, then adapt it for them. There is not such thing as a matron anymore - the Yummy Mummy has slain her.

McCartney has always been one for knowing what women want to wear, because she works according to her own needs. It just so happens that she tends to work out what those are before we do.

Check back soon to see every look from the show