People are often criticised for going back to things, be it a bad relationship or their natural hair colour. We’re encouraged, what with our amphetamine-y culture of progress, and ‘new’, above all else, not to revisit or reminisce, but to embrace the Next Big Thing even if we might not like it that much.

Fashion is particularly guilty of this – it’s less trend-driven than it used to be (and thank goodness those ‘fast fashion’ days of being encouraged to buy into almost every ill-fitting and ill-advised look going are over), but there still isn’t much time to really stop and take stock.

"The pieces you find yourself returning to time and again are part of your fashion psyche"

Blame Instagram and live-streams. Blame the high street for catching onto next season’s trends before the models have even left the catwalks. Blame everyone around you for being savvy to street style and jumping on the bandwagon before it has even been hooked up to the horses and readied for departure.

Regardless, there are some things you find yourself returning to – they aren’t classic items, like an LBD or a trench, nor are they quite those fashion boomerang pieces that hove into view every five years or so, before being banished to the sartorial hinterlands as soon as we tire of them (again).

The pieces you find yourself returning to time and again are more like a part of your psyche, a comfort you turn to when out of ideas; a favourite perfume, your mother’s chicken soup, the bum-shaped dent in the sofa moulded especially to you.

Mine are hot pink (anything), and black skinny jeans. I actually had to think quite hard to come up with them, so ingrained and innate are they in my fashion subconscious. It was like unlocking a past life that I’m still living. These are the things in my wardrobe that I keep coming back to – or rather, that I never left behind.

It isn’t that they’re hideously uncool, or at the lowest point of the ever-turning trend cycle. It isn’t even that I wear them all day every day without looking at anything else on offer. It’s simply that these two things are what I wear regardless of life events, reinvention or what the tastemakers tell me. I know I can rely on them.

Victoria Beckham’s is a jean tucked into a platform boot, an outfit she wore to an airport last month that is at once totally Victoria Beckham and totally at odds with the flat shoe-wearing, 90s avant garde-citing designer she has become since Baden Baden. In a way, it’s comforting to see the remnants of that prior incarnation – to know that the putting on of a midi-skirt doesn’t absolve previous indulgences.

Kate Moss’s is a blazer, or tailored waistcoat. Neither looks wrong on her – in fact, the very opposite – but nor do they look current. They look like what they are: some pieces she discovered she enjoyed wearing and that magically felt right all the time, that she stuck with for good.

And proof – if you needed any – that old faithfuls aren’t just for the stuck-in-a-style-rut over-30s, comes from Kristen Stewart, whose Converse and skinny jeans are almost omnipresent but for her red carpet appearances. They’re almost a uniform, the purest expression of a fashion personality.

This isn’t to say you won’t spend much of the summer trying out new trends in dungarees, pleated skirts or sports luxe, of course. It’s simply that, in order to achieve true style nirvana, one must take on board one’s natural proclivities, and thoroughly map out the boundaries of one’s comfort zone. Forcing yourself into the latest look when it doesn’t suit isn’t worth it when you know you have tried and tested back-up hanging in your wardrobe.

Victoria, Kate and Kristen know as much, and now you do too. Without meaning to dampen the spirit of adventure too much, embrace what you know and cling tight to it.