Our panelists on the latest and greatest celebrity looks

Amanda Seyfried wears Balmain in New York

Zoe Rocha, TV producer
Very pretty, very 1950s spring in New York. The shoulder pads could have been in danger of making it a bit frumpy, but with her slender pins looking phenomenal and peeping out of the cute mini-skirt, she has managed to keep the look fresh and young. The red lippy is just the right contrast to the pink and white houndstooth, but I just wish she'd thrown caution to the wind and gone wild with her hair. A bit of aggressive backcombing and an attack of hairspray would have gone down a treat.

Harriet Walker, news editor at Never Underdressed
I can't decide whether this look made me think of lovely Richard Avedon photography or of Melanie Griffiths in Working Girl, and therein lies its power. At its heart lies some of the future-femme collarless and swing tailoring that Pierre Balmain pioneered so brilliantly in the Fifties; at its rump is some of the Eighties disco fabulousness that current creative director Olivier Rousteing has been channelling so heartily for some time now. Amanda Seyfried is just the clothes horse for this, combining as she does girlishness with something more glitzy – especially as she's wearing it to a publicity slot for her new Linda Lovelace biopic. Oo-er.

Judith Watt, fashion historian at Central Saint Martins
Coco Chanel loathed the new generation of male designers that rose to fame in the late 1940s and reigned supreme in Paris during the 1950s. Pierre Balmain was one of the ‘ces messieurs’ she dismissed with scorn, gay men who turned back the clock, strapping women back into corsets, enveloping them in copious layers of skirts, constricting, as she saw it, the freedom she had given them back in the early 1920s. So it is interesting that Olivier Rousteing, the designer at Balmain, has effectively drawn from her decorative signature houndstooth check and subverted the masculine note with baby pink. Pierre Balmain always gave women a waist and this is significantly lacking here. It is a 1980s silhouette, defined by the shoulder line and the bias cut detail of the short skirt. Rousteing  has been drawn to the 1980s experimentation with the masculine silhouette of Claude Montana in this and his autumn collection. Nothing wrong with that; Montana is one of the great designers designer and a master of cut. But Pierre Balmain, celebrated in Peter Sarstedt’s paean to the 1960s jet-set Where Do You Go to My Lovely, would never have presented a suit that made a beautiful woman look boxy. And nor would La Chanel.

(left to right: Zoe Rocha, Harriet Walker, Judith Watt)