Somewhere around the mid-1990s, the world went nuts for pashminas. The fancy, warm, expensive and soft-as-silk scarves were made from the underfur – or 'pashm' – of goats from the Himalayas but they first came to public prominence when they were adopted by the Sloaney set. They were a fashion status symbol: women called Anoushka draped themselves in a metre squared of lilac cashmere as they waited for a cab on a summer evening that had turned chilly. The royal nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke was papped wearing a purple pashmina and a bucket hat in 1996. 

The pashmina was expensive but it was practical too. It wasn’t something showy that had gained notoriety through catwalk shows or magazine fashion shoots but rather the scarf became a hit through its sheer wearability. Women teamed pasminas with evening gowns and with Voyage dresses; they used them to dress up a simple jeans-and-top combination. The well-off – the Sloaney kind (Susannah Constantine pre-What Not To Wear), the Hollywood kind (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the bohemian Portobello kind (Kate Moss, Jade Jagger) – bought several in a variety of colours. 

It all came to a head to in 1999. The high street had caught up with the pashmina. 'Practically everybody has at least one,' the founder of Whistles, Lucille Lewin, told Jess Cartner-Morley in an article about pashminas in the Guardian in June 1999. The same article reported that Marks & Spencer and Debenhams were to sell pashminas that autumn – and for just £100, half the typical price. 

"Tory politician Iain Duncan Smith coined the term 'pashmina politics' in reference to the fad going out of fashion."

In May 1999, Denise van Outen was spotted in a pashmina. Britney Spears wore one that year too. Suddenly pashminas were everywhere. Too everywhere. In its August 1999 issue, British Vogue boldly declared that, owing to its ubiquity, the pashmina was dead.

The Daily Mail responded by launching a campaign called Save Our Pashminas and offered readers the chance to buy a pashmina for £59.95. ‘Snub the style snobs by buying a pashmina – at a special low price’ the paper urged. 

It sort of worked. Hollywood stars, like Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel, were spotted wearing pashminas at the Oscars parties of 2000.

But in June 2001, the term ‘pashmina politics’, meaning ‘the adoption of political policies immediately after they have gone out of fashion’, was coined when the Conservative politician and unlikely Vogue reader, Iain Duncan Smith, discussed his rival for Tory leadership, Michael Portillo. 'My concern would be we launch off on "pashmina politics" where we end up adopting the fad just about to go out of fashion,' he said. The BBC reported on the newly coined phrase (the British media had become pashmina-obsessed) and the term entered the dictionary.    

In 2002, Carrie Bradshaw made her position on pashminas (so over) clear when her laptop broke and she wrapped it in a scarf. ‘Two meltdowns later, we rushed my ’98 laptop in my ’99 pashmina to Techserve,’ she said in season four, episode eight, 'My Motherboard, My Self' (It's the one where Miranda's mother dies).   

Yet still people wore them. Like Martine McCutcheon. In 2004. And Liv Tyler in 2005. And well everybody. Admit it: you wore a pashmina as recently as 2004, didn’t you? 

Gradually, though, they became an item only worn by the Sloaney set. The vogue for pashminas turned out to be an ouroboros of a trend, starting and ending in Knightsbridge, popular perpetually with royalty and Sloanes but the rest of us were briefly involved from 1999-2005.

Click the gallery to see the best pashminas.