Sometimes, a few separate trends will coalesce to create something that’s fun and relatively approachable to wear, jumping off a mood board and into our actual wardrobes. Enter mixing and matching – or stacking – your stripes, an approach to pattern that’s preppy, colourful and adds some personality to a work or dressier weekend wardrobe. A host of designers, such as CELINE and Charvet, are creating shirts and ties that, with a bit of imagination, pair together in a way that’s much more complementary than clashing.

Wearing a striped shirt and tie isn’t necessarily at the forefront of avant-garde dressing, but what it does is open some opportunities to work colour and pattern into normal proceedings. It builds off the resurgent ivy-meets-prep trend that’s grown in menswear over the last few years, alongside the fact that it’s no longer a formal requirement in most places to wear a tie. Which is exactly why it’s a great time to wear a tie.

Sure, there’s a little bit of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko in there. Although we wouldn’t recommend the banker shirts with contrasting collars and solid-gold tie bars – nor the voracious greed and corporate immorality – with a studied carelessness (what the Italians call sprezzatura) in the way that the elements come together, even though they probably shouldn’t.

Ralph Lauren, of course, is the benchmark when it comes to all of this: colour, playing with social codes, looking smart and unfussy at the same time. If you want to know how to wear a brightly coloured knit tie with a pink shirt, he’s your man. Or look to painter David Hockney, who has mastered, perhaps better than anyone, the art of looking like you’ve thrown the contents of your wardrobe on at random. Then, of course, there’s the City Boy look from Tokyo, popularised by Popeye magazine, defined by guys who can mix in shirts, ties, fatigue trousers, seersucker and vintage denim in one outfit.

Recently, the designer Michael Rider at CELINE, who graduated from the school of Ralph, has added some American verve and colour to the storied Parisian label and, in turn, the fashion landscape. One of his most memorable interpretations of that new vision is a vivid red blazer worn with light-wash denim, a pale blue stripey poplin shirt and a thick silk tie with a repp stripe. Americana, Ivy, Parisian laissez-faire – it’s all in the mix.

Then there are the likes of Drake’s, Beams Plus, Paul Smith, Auralee and Charvet, the grandfather of French craft and heritage when it comes to clothes that haven’t gone out of fashion for a couple of centuries.

The repp stripe tie (spelt that way and named after the “repetitive” diagonal stripes that appear on the fabric) has been around since British boarding schools and their associated uniforms came into existence but have been given a contemporary spin in more recent times. Part of the fun of stacking stripes is putting it all together and seeing what you come up with. Don’t worry about things not matching. That’s the whole point.