How did Pringle become fashionable?

All over the country, yesterday, golfing dads got back from walking the alsation in a state of high excitement over the contents of the morning paper. "You see, Marjorie? You see?" they were crying, jabbing in turn at page three of the Daily Telegraph and at their right nipples. Their wives turned from the washing-up, adjusting their reading glasses with a pair of soapy Marigolds, and read the news with disbelief. Pringle, and with it a million men called Geoffrey, is fashionable again. Better than that; it is fashion again.

How and when this happened, no one can possibly say, but there it was. Miss Jodie Kidd, the model, was on a catwalk at London Fashion Week having apparently been sunbathing topless in her back garden when a rotary clothes dryer fell on top of her. Oh, no, actually, it was a "daringly beaded halter-neck top worn with black tuxedo trousers", but it was certainly Jodie Kidd, pouting as if she was trying to extract a raspberry pip from her teeth without opening her mouth.

With her were two friends in, respectively, "a sleeveless V-neck top with beret and mini shorts" and "soft ballet-wrap cardigan over crisp white frilled shirt and sprigged skirt". What is sprigged? Never mind. The first point was that you couldn't wear any of this on a golf course if the wind was up without considerable embarrassment, which is not a bad definition of fashion. The second point is that it is unarguably by Pringle.

Goodness me. Pringle has been naff for so long that, at the age of 37, I have never ever owned or considered owning a top by them. They have always been something for dads from Guildford as far as I know. But apparently things have changed. The brand's new owner, Kenneth Fang, a Hong Kong businessman, recruited Kim Winser, a designer from, of all places, Marks & Spencer, to revitalise it, and this is the result. It may very well work.

The usual explanation for this familiar process is that a brand like this spends years being nothing but a familiar name, when along comes a daring new designer and attaches all sorts of daring new clothes to the name. All of a sudden, everyone notices the new look, and before you know it, the brand is back in business.

But there's another explanation, which doesn't assume that there are solid values of dull and exciting clothes in fashion, but just different ways of looking at the same things. A brand, once very stylish, plods on meaninglessly for year after year, and then, quite suddenly, someone somewhere decides to start wearing these sad clothes as a bit of a joke. It is as if the brand has become steadily naffer and naffer, and then one day it breaks through some invisible barrier, and the naffness has become perfectly irresistible.

Some time in the late 1980s, a well-meaning friend gave me a Gucci tie as a birthday present. I politely thanked them and took it away, thinking that I couldn't remember the last time anyone suggested taking in Gucci in the course of a trip up Bond Street – this was some time before Tom Ford. It was only a day or two later that I found myself looking, strangely fascinated, at the tie, and its old-fashioned pattern of horses' heads and horse-shoes and thinking, hmm, why not? Odder than that, whenever I put it on, someone always said how much they liked it.

Of course, Tom Ford completely changed Gucci, but that doesn't always happen to these revitalised brands. There's an excellent book called The Tipping Point about the spread of ideas and mass desires, which starts with a study of the sudden craze for Hush Puppies in New York in the 1990s. Nothing had happened to the shoes; suddenly people wanted to wear them.

Similarly, with the wild success of the hideous Burberry tartan. They made it into all sorts of new things, but it was pretty much the same as it had always been. It got naffer and naffer and naffer, and then all at once that naffness was highly desirable, without anyone ever having to do anything much.

It happens in other areas of life, of course. Poor old Tony Blackburn and Christine Hamilton have been plodding away for years as the object of general derision, and then all at once people can't get enough of him wittering away in a sickeningly cheerful way or of her "commanding" voice, as I believe it is politely called. If only this applied to everything.

"Frank, I've called you into my office for a little chat. For a long time, you'll have been aware that we haven't promoted you beyond junior filing clerk. It was just the way you were always late, ponged the office out with your poor personal hygiene and half-eaten bacon sandwiches and couldn't be trusted with the simplest tasks. Well, we've realised these are just the skills we need. We're promoting you to CEO. Welcome to the board. And you don't even need to change your Pringle cardigan."

p.hensher@independent.co.uk