The 77-year-old founder of Biba, Barbara Hulanicki, was in the papers this week after pronouncing that women nowadays ‘have such boring wardrobes’.

And Hulanicki, who founded Biba in the early 1960s, has put the blame for this ho-hum attire firmly at the door of our modern obsession with following trends.

‘There’s too much interest in clothes now and it makes women dress less well,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I think people are too concerned about what’s fashionable. Women have such boring wardrobes these days because they must follow fashion, they must, they must. But sometimes it’s about saying, oh, this would work well with that.’

So is Hulanicki right? Is the high street and its incessant trend-led turnover killing our innate sense of style? Could the money we spend on Balenciaga-inspired bargains or dresses that reference Louis Vuitton pre-fall but cost 25 quid actually be making us worse-dressed?

Mandi Lennard, one of London’s most well known and respected fashion PRs and founder of the brand consultancy Mandi’s Basement, agrees with Hulanicki.

‘Fast fashion in this day and age is distasteful,’ she says. ‘I don't respect cheap clothing and seeing myself 'bin' a top as it didn't cost much and in the light of day looks like a piece of rubbish, makes me physically sick.’

But what are we supposed to do if we want to look stylish and have limited funds? Simply buy less, she says. ‘Everyone thinks I've got loads of clothes; I don't,’ Lennard confides. ‘I wear all my clothes until they fall apart. I fall in love with my clothes, and in rotating them. I appreciate their role in my everyday life.’

She says that when spending significant sums she tends to opt for ‘radical fashion by Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe’.

‘This is fashion that catapults you into the new, this is design that transcends fashion,’ she explains.

So what’s behind our habit of slavishly following trends rather than investing in design? Elspeth Jenkins, a freelance stylist living and working Antwerp, blames celebrity.

‘I think everything exploded around the time the celebrity obsession kicked in, when the whole Sienna Miller hype started. Sienna wearing cowboy boots under rara skirts matched with a Chloé bag, Kate Moss and her glued-on skinny jeans around the same time. Then we had the It bags. The obsession with trends goes hand in hand with our obsession with celebrity.’

Jenkins takes a similar view to Lennard on fast fashion and the trend-led high street – ‘Fast fashion is something you don't have to think about. If you don't like it when you get home, it doesn’t matter. Or you wear a certain trend a few times, and then just because it's so, so cheap, you throw it out,’ she says – but she maintains that spending lots of money on an outfit won’t necessarily mean you escape Hulanicki’s sharp tongue.

"'There’s too much interest in clothes now and it makes women dress less well,' Hulanicki says"

‘I would never say someone dressed head-to-toe in this season's Prada is well dressed. I would just think they have a lot of money to spend. Style is not about blindly following trends, it's about editing trends that look good on you,’ says Jenkins.

So if style isn’t about fast fashion and it isn’t about spending a couple of grand in the Prada store in one go, what is about? ‘I know it's a cliché but mixing designer with vintage and high street does really work,’ she says. ‘It's like having different friends from different backgrounds: life tends to be more interesting when you have variety. Same goes for clothes.’

Lennard agrees, citing friends and colleagues who manage to combine a love of fashion with a sense of trend-bucking style.  ‘Cozette McCreery of Sibling always looks cool, sassy and street, she's comfortable in her shell,’ Lennard says. ‘Princess Julia has a bottomless wardrobe of vintage that she circulates with the latest pieces from designer friends, and Lulu Kennedy is always my right-on sister as she's feeding off fashion 24/7, but she's still a hippy at heart and she'd never compromise that for fashion.’

So we’re back to Hulanicki’s assertion that style is ‘about saying, oh, this would work well with that’. It can be influenced by trends and the high street – you can still buy your £25 skorts – but style, it seems, will always be a little trickier than spending lots of money or being first in line at the latest high street/designer collaboration opening.

True style is a mercurial, elusive quality, difficult to pin down and impossible to fake. It was that way when Biba ruled in 1965, it’s the same now, and that’s what makes it so fun.