The Duchess of Cambridge hits Topshop

What do royal brides do when they're not playing wifey to the future King of England out in the sticks? Decamp to London to plunder its high street for bargainous loot. So, to Topshop, where the Duchess of Cambridge's "I'm so normal, me" campaign picked up pace: she was spotted making use of the joint bank account in a branch on High Street Kensington this week.

Mrs Wills Windsor is no stranger to shopping on the high street, of course - wit her pre-wedding dash in Warehouse , Banana Republic and Whistles on the King's Road in April - but this Topshop pitstop appears to be a first. She bought a forest-green pencil skirt (fashion bullseye! The length is on the money for autumn) with black polka dots (double score! Lichtenstein-ish dots prevail as the print du jour ) for £38, and a cobalt velvet-trim boucle jacket for £65 (standard K-Middy fodder, acts as a riposte to the out-there fash-ness of the skirt). A pair of £8 earrings were also in the frame, but she abandoned these at the last minute - given her riches, we can only surmise it was the design, rather than the cost.

Keeping to her no-fuss approach, she queued up for the changing rooms like the rest of us (kudos, but if we were in her position, we would have jumped the hellish scrum that is the Topshop queue).

All this was witnessed by a lass called Ashlin, who, as coincidence would have it, is Kate's number one fan-girl: she runs a blog which laboriously pores over K-Middy's fashion choices - getwhatkatewore.com .

"I was so star-struck that I was shaking and I had to ask myself: 'Am I alive?' As soon as I saw her face...I felt like I was in a dream," writes Ashlin beatifically. "You know when you think something which you know could never possibly be true … but then it is true…and you are like so shocked that you don't feel alive?"

Indeed - we felt the same way about the sartorially safe Duchess snapping up that on-trend skirt.

Burberry's Twitter takeover

Earlier this year, Burberry's chief creative officer Christopher Bailey said that "Burberry is now as much a media-content company as we are a design company", and it seems that Bailey is staying true to his word.

At their London Fashion Week runway show, Burberry staged a 'Tweetwalk' in which instant backstage 'Twitpics' were shared on Twitter before the models hit the catwalk. The move created an enormous amount of traffic on Burberry's Twitter page, catapaulting both '#Burberry' and 'Christopher Bailey' into the social media site's worldwide 'Trending' list. Not only was the label's mentions-per-minute record smashed, the backstage images received more than 50,000 views within half an hour of the show.

Burberry has over half a million Twitter followers and an astronomical 8.5 million Facebook 'likes', however the online takeover was not popular with everyone. While Bailey said that he "gets excited about using all of those [online] platforms to communicate to all of our different communities around the world about what we're doing," other 'Tweeters' were in uproar about the congestion that the 'Tweetwalk' caused.

One well-known blogger slammed the brand for their 'takeover' of Twitter, pointing out that the site is about encouraging "a conversation…its not a broadcast," however Bailey explained to Mashable that "digital communication and technology are part of the way everybody lives. We're a 155-year-old company, but a very young team. It would almost be weird if we didn't do it".

With a Twitter takeover, more Facebook likes than Jesus Christ and a 3D holographic runway under their belt, we must ask ourselves, what's next for Burberry and their media invasion?

Rihanna + rural + raunchy = her new video

Rihanna brought a tiny town in Northern Ireland to a virtual standstill, after using it as the location of her new video.

The star brought her film crew to a field in rural Bangor, to shoot the music video for new track We Found Love - a collaboration with Brit talent Calvin Harris.

And dressed in a bandana-style red bikini, low-slung jeans and a checked shirt, she certainly made sure she made an impression on the local residents...

Rihanna indulges in some good old fashioned rural raunch in her new video. Photo:Rex Features

However, not everyone was impressed by her antics, including the farmer who owned the field she was frolicking in - who requested that she 'cover up', so to speak.

"I thought it was inappropriate. I requested them to stop and they did," Alan Graham told the BBC.

"I had my conversation with Rihanna and I hope she understands where I'm coming from. We shook hands," he added, apparently completely oblivious that he'd been talking to one of the most famous females on the planet.

"I didn't know who was coming. If the name 'Rihanna' had been mentioned, well, no disrespect but it wouldn't have meant anything."

Revisiting 18th Century Fashion - review

The Palace of Versailles and Musée Galliera are staging an exhibition, Revisiting 18th Century Fashion, in the apartments of the Grand Trianon, at Versailles. It hinges on the understandable interest in that era displayed by contemporary dress designers. The dialogue between the era of the Dangerous Liaisons and the present-day works so well it is often hard to date the 60 selected garments. In fact only a quarter of the exhibits, taken from the Galliera collection, are historic, very few items of clothing having survived the French revolution.

The exhibition brings to life the delightful pink-marble Italianate palace. A succession of reception rooms and apartments, flooded with light from high windows, dazzle the eye with masses of silk taffeta, lace, and gold or silk embroidery. You fully expect to run into Madame de Pompadour or Marie-Antoinette. The epitome of refinement, the Grand Trianon was designed by Mansart but now attracts far fewer visitors than does the main palace.

The show starts in the Salle des Gardes with a display centring on an habit à la française, with its embroidered blue silk jacket, waistcoat and breeches, dated 1765.

In 1990 the late Alexander McQueen, then chief designer at Givenchy, revisited this precursor of the three-piece suit with an outfit in silver lace. Vivienne Westwood preferred steel-coloured silk, whereas Jean-Paul Gaultier opted for a jacket in metallised organza.

The first sign of fresh interest in this period came in the 1950s, with superb evening dresses by Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain, illustrated by two ball gowns embroidered with gold and dotted with pearls. After the interruption caused by the 1960s and hippy culture, it was only at the 1980s that catwalks once again witnessed such lavish use of silk and corsets returned to emphasise the female form.

The exhibition features a satin dress by Westwood inspired by a portrait of Pompadour by Boucher. It is provocatively named Vive la Cocotte (long live the kept woman). But probably the most accomplished reworking of 18th century styles has been done by Christian Lacroix, with his complex patchworks, embroidered with coloured gems and meshed with gold and silver.

Oddly from a modern perspective, while adoring lavish display, the Enlighte ment also dreamt of getting back to nature.

Giorgio Armani and Roberto Cavalli close Milan Fashion Week

Giorgio Armani and Roberto Cavalli have a combined age of 148 - and diametrically opposed views on life. Armani, who likes aerodynamic women with boyish physiques, founded an empire on a Look But Don't Get Too Excited approach to sexuality in clothing.

Cavalli, who as much as possible, would like everyone to resemble voluptuous Italian starlets, founded a business on tight animal prints expressly conceived to inspire heavy breathing.

At the end of their respective shows, Armani stands alone at the end of his catwalk, dressed in his habitual navy blue calico trousers and cotton T-shirt, a beatific expression of prayer on his face as he presses his hands together in benediction (offering thanks to the gods of pastel perhaps). Cavalli strides down the catwalk in creaking leather trousers or jackets, trailing Eva, his ex-beauty queen wife, and heady clouds of aftershave behind him as he eyes up the celebrities in his front row.

It is a testament to the diversity of taste that still exists in an increasingly homogenised global market that both men continue to profit from such diametrically different aesthetics - more than profit, since both had the honour of bringing Milan Fashion Week to a close.

Both did so by sticking to the founding principles of their success with tiny - almost imperceptible to the naked eye - tweaks. At Cavalli, to a soundtrack that sounded like machine gun, the models romped around in empire line, leopard and snake printed chiffon dresses that attempted to combine classic Cavalli hammer-over-the-head seduction techniques with a touch of Kate Greenaway. It was an ambitious marriage if not an entirely convincing one.

For Armani, against the soothing rhythm of lapping waves, the evolution focussed on soft jackets with slightly more pointy than usual shoulders that evoked the prow of a small fishing boat, and a new slim trouser, slit up the front. He cuts a good pair of trousers, when he's not being tricksy, and this one was big news. Just in case this message was lost on anyone, Armani showed them underneath the pointy jackets, beneath sarong skirts, or with dresses- and sometimes with all three. Fortunes were mixed , but Armani's beaded red carpet dresses , especially the strapless ones that looked like uber glamorous towels, are always fit for purpose, although the accompanying cuban heeled shoes didn't do them full justice.

There was a seaside theme - hence the gentle aqueous hues of those iridescent silks, the shell coloured embellishment on the evening wear and, presumably, the prow-boaty shoulder. But was Armani trying to tell us something more? Were the models posing as the Three Graces in their beaded towel dresses and the mellow moon that hovered over the catwalk code for "I'm retiring to Koh Samui?"