The definition of what constitutes a luxury brand may have changed over the past few years, but, whether you’re producing streetwear or Savile Row suits, it really only comes down to three things: the best quality fabrics money can buy, unparalleled craftsmanship sourced from traditional manufacturing centres and an obsessive attention to detail. To help you make sense of the often dizzying surge of new-season collections, we’ve provided a primer on three of the biggest luxury brands in the business and their latest collections, just in time to prep your wardrobe for autumn. Look out for the next instalment in The Journal, where we’ll be deciphering some of the best off-duty brands in MR PORTER’s roster.

You might ask why we are fixated on a shearling jacket after barely surviving the recent heatwave without dissolving into a puddle. But in return, we’d pose you this simple question: have you seen it? Impossibly plush-looking, the pale iteration of the winter wardrobe classic is setting the outerwear bar very high this season. We would expect no less, of course, from Italian luxury expert Brunello Cucinelli, a pioneer of the “stealth luxury” subgenre of style since the 1980s (read: before it was even a thing). There is plenty more where that came from, too. Continuing the theme are plenty of cashmere in dusty, neutral shades, sophisticated camel-coloured outerwear and the designer’s luxe sportswear – none of which you should, under any circumstances, wear to play actual sports.

Loro Piana, the Italian fabric expert that’s been in the business since 1924, is one of those labels you either “get” or don’t. Its particular brand of casualwear is what you might call “ultra luxe” and the corresponding price tag confirms it. The good news is that a little goes a long way, and for a brand that prides itself on the strength of its classics, it must be positively beaming this time around: simple (but not insignificant) updates to the label’s signature styles – a suede undercollar added to its Rain System jacket, and removing the zip from the Roadster sweater – make them immeasurably better this season.

Mr Tom Ford’s design philosophy is simple: don’t settle for anything less than perfection. And that maxim applies as much to a plain cotton T-shirt as it does a wool barathea tuxedo with all the trimmings. Achieving perfection, of course, is harder than it looks, but the American designer seems to have managed it once more. This season, Mr Ford has offered up an assortment of jewel- and pastel-toned tailoring, Western-inspired denim and a rich mahogany leather jacket so picture-perfect it might very well have been summoned from the pages of a sepia-toned scrapbook from the 1970s. Think of it as the sort of outerwear your dad might have donned back in the day, if your dad was a lithe, high-cheekboned frontman performing at CBGB.