Roll up, roll up...

"Turnips are back," screeched my mother over the phone. "And here's me still eating broccoli!" She likes to be a wit, albeit a slightly deaf one. Obviously, I was talking about turn-ups, not the versatile, orange root vegetable. By what strange osmosis women have decided to turn up the bottom of their jeans this spring I do not know, but the turn-up epidemic is a virulent one.

Everywhere I go, be it Scratchwood service station or swank Dolce & Gabbana cocktail party, the turn-ups are out in force.

Maybe we've all spent a fortune on designer shoes this season, and have adopted turn-ups as a better way of showing them off. Or maybe it's just one of those things.

Certainly, the turn-up is a trend that has come from the street rather than the catwalk. Miu Miu, Marc and McQueen showed rolled-up jeans as part of their spring collections, but that's because their stylists all hail from London, a city responsible for spawning the most interesting street fashion in the world, where turn-ups have been in and out of fashion since the Fifties.

When I was a style fascist working on The Face magazine, you were only supposed to turn your jeans up if you had a fancy selvedge to show off. We'd spend most of our meagre salary on Evisu jeans with selvedges in rare colours. But The Face is shut now, and gone with it are all those pernickety bits of fashion etiquette that separated the clued-up from the clueless. These days, everyone turns up their jeans, even if they don't know what a selvedge is, far less what it should look like. (Suitwearers' appendix: a selvedge is the strip of material woven along the edge of your jeans so it doesn't unravel.)

While it's true that turned-up jeans are best suited to the lanky of leg, don't be put off. Even if you are Kylie-sized, they can still look cute. What they can never look is leg-lengthening, so if you are small and don't want to look smaller, steer clear.

With combat pants still firmly in the "down" section of the fashion barometer, turned-up jeans are this spring's working alternative.

The cuff effect has the same casual, slouchy air as the combat, and is a wholly different proposition to the floor-sweeping, boot-cut jean so beloved of Mrs Beckham and co. Rolling your jeans so that they sit just above the ankle suddenly feels right - and with the weather so undependable right now, your ankles are about the only flesh it's safe to bare.