The fashion year always starts fashionably late — on January 16, to be precise — with Kate Moss’s birthday, an event that can be relied upon to provide both the first wobbly —taxi-exit paparazzi shots of the new year and the first celebrity trend.

To celebrate turning 34, Moss chose a star-print Chanel jumpsuit, and so, with one outfit, set the style agenda for early 2008: star prints for the teenagers, Chanel for the high-end fashionistas and jumpsuits for the edgy brigade.

But 2008 was to see a changing of the guard, as the middle-youth party people of Moss’s Primrose Hill were replaced by a junior A-list half their age: Daisy Lowe, 19, Alexa Chung , 25, Agyness Deyn, 25, Pixie Geldof, 18, Georgia May Jagger, 16, and Alice Dellal, 21.

Gwyneth Paltrow, recognising which way the fashion wind was blowing, spent the first months of the year in the gym, in preparation for the unveiling of her new look.

The mainstays of this were fierce-looking, extra-high-heeled shoes, a long bob and a dress or jacket with lots of points.

All three turned out to be huge trends.

While the new teenaged front-rowers kept the teen and twenty-somethings amused with the cocktail of deranged hairstyles and misguided romantic liaisons, the grown-ups had a new set of style icons, too: the new-look First Ladies.

The phenomenon began at 11.26am on March 26, when Carla Bruni landed at London Heathrow airport.

Technically, she was accompanying her husband, France’s President Sarkozy, on an official trip, but the British media had eyes only for Bruni, and her gorgeously understated wardrobe of made-to-measure Dior.

But as Obama fever gripped the globe, not even Bruni could compete with the rise of a new style icon: Michelle Obama.

When the wife of the just-crowned Democratic candidate posed for cameras in a purple shift dress with studded Alaia belt, the fashion world found a new star. When she casually chatted to a chat-show host about buying her J Crew outfit online, it made her seem accessible in a way Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain never managed.