Fashion: Bianca and Jerry were simply It: Two fabulous women shared more than a Rolling Stone. They were the sparkling, sultry embodiment of Seventies style. The best of the decade's retro is fashioned in their image, says Marion Hume

MICK JAGGER got it right. He began the Seventies by marrying one fashion icon and ended the decade living with another; from Bianca Jagger, sophisticated, expensive and glamorous, to Jerry Hall, rangy, raunchy and vital.

She needed to be all that to get him from Bianca. The settlement was said to cost dollars 1m (when dollars 1m was dollars 1m. Well, almost).

For those who were expecting the future of fashion to be classic and understated, the barging back of Seventies retro clothes must be a worry - especially if we're talking Sweet and the Bee Gees, crimped hair and ricrac braid. You might call that the worst of it.

But the second exposure of the Seventies, the glorious bit, is illuminating; the best of it was truly stylish, in a sparkling, gutsy way not matched by the Armani-elegant, no-risk Eighties and early Nineties.

It is the return to the styles of Bianca and Jerry, the satin-sultry and the platform-soled wild, that sums up what's most tempting in a Seventies rerun.

When Bianca Jagger turns up today at her chum Calvin Klein's fashion shows, she causes a stir. For she still looks innovative and immaculate. Back then, wearing one of her trouser suits and walking into the noise of the disco decade, she could reduce a throng to awe-struck silence.

These days, Jerry Hall will play the vamp at any opening and nobody will pay much attention. She may be wealthy in her own right, what with her hair-dye ads and Bovril commercials, and she's still hanging in there with Mick, but she's certainly no longer in the league table of the super-chic. In the Seventies she certainly was.

She turned up on the modelling scene after a man slipped his business card into her crochet bikini while she was lying on the beach on the French Riviera, fresh out of Texas. She was soon launched as the Vogue 'It' girl, wearing a rubber-look swimsuit for Helmut Newton and a teeny bikini for Norman Parkinson.

She was the star of Paris. She ate lunch with Jean-Paul Sartre and took tea with Salvador Dali. She was one of 'Antonio's girls', glittering models who hung around with the illustrator Antonio Lopez, who idealised their features and particularly liked to draw them metamorphosing into high-heeled shoes. Jessica Lange, Tina Chow and Grace Jones were there, too.

Bianca was in New York, London, then St Tropez for her wedding day. That white Yves Saint Laurent pant suit she wore was the one everyone wanted to have. Unlike most people who married in the Seventies, she can still look at her wedding photos without cringing.

In some ways, Bianca was the Seventies. She married Mick at the beginning, divorced him near the end and in between rode a white horse into the New York night-club Studio 54, straight into fashion mythology.

She was fabulously difficult; she cancelled dates with Mick because she was having her hair washed. She had more clothes, meticulously packed in Louis Vuitton trunks, than anyone else in the smart set. But clothes were for posing in; few can remember her doing anything as dishevelling as dancing.

Now a grandmother, she has re- cast herself from society's spoilt darling into Nicaragua's guardian angel, while managing to remain at the epicentre of the Manhattan in-crowd.

Bianca's Seventies look is easy to do again. Saint Laurent has hardly changed his mannish tailoring, so those with money could go for the real thing.

Otherwise, there are plenty of Seventies-style pant suits (as opposed to the roomier trouser suits that dominated this winter) from the younger designers. Corinne Cobson's version, shown here, has skinny-legged trousers that flare out over shoes.

There is also a wide choice of structured jackets around, including Whistles' own-label, Bianca-style jacket, seen here with a crochet bikini.

The bikini covers more flesh than those Jerry once wore, but is still utterly Ms Hall, as is the hair. But the sporty cord jacket, low-slung trousers and peaked cap are much more Mick. For Jagger not only chose the women who epitomised the decade, he was himself - along with Bryan Ferry, from whom he wooed Jerry - a great style icon of the Seventies.

(Photographs omitted)