Schlock horror

River Island, £150

I imagine these are every bit as comfortable as the gibbet from which they were removed.  You know, we don't display the bodies of executed miscreants at crossroads often enough these days.

That funny smell? It's style, being gently composted

Lovely!  A scratchy acrylic beanie for those sultry summer days when only the fabulous binman look will do.

If you really want to throw away thirty pounds I'd lean your foot lightly 'pon the pedal-bin and place three crisp tenners gently therein.  Money well spent, I'd say.

River Island, £30.

Yellow peril

http://www.riverisland.com/women/shorts/smart-shorts/Yellow-fluro-boucle-smart-city-shorts-635171

Well, these are fun, fun, fun, aren't they?  River Island, the merry pranksters that they are, want you to feel like it's Sports Day 1975 all over again, coming last behind the dull girl with bristly knees and a faint but persistent odour of kippers.

£28.  A bargain, given that these fasten at the back and come up all the way to your armpits.

Diamond queaser

Matthew Williamson wants you to wrap up tight this winter, so why not slip into a knit of the kind of transcendent ugliness that makes even the jet stream swerve north?
Heartless bastards wear this kind of thing on a country walk and make deer plunge into the path of oncoming traffic.

£380, Urban Outfitters.  If you've just won three hundred and eighty quid on an accumulator at Betfred, please go and blow it all on booze and unsuitable boyfriends instead.

Things that go clump in the night

The kind of visual disturbance vouchsafed only to the fevered, this dress is a warning that you have become dehydrated and need a Lemsip.  Opening the cupboard to find this collapsing unpleasantly onto the carpet, rather than the usual rattly, disarticulated skeleton, is a super way to celebrate Hallowe'en, and is just the thing to wear while you are summoning the legions of the dead.

And those boots will make your mum think the ghosts of  the entire Household Cavalry are in the house.

This is from House of Holland, and costs £225, which is more than the entire budget of all four Paranormal Activity films.  That should have you leaping out of your seat and grabbing the arm of the stranger sitting next to you.

Dive! Dive! Dive!

Neoprene Oversized Boyfriend Coat, Topshop, £115

Quite apart from the obvious gag about oversized boyfriends, there are a number of things wrong with this coat.  Of course there are, missy, otherwise it wouldn't be making an appearance in the Hall of Shame, now, would it?

Anyway, the neoprene thing:  wetsuits work by trapping a layer of water 'twixt skin and suit, which warms up and thus allows you to swim underwater without turning blue.  Furthermore, neoprene absorbs water and becomes enormously heavy.  In a downpour you will be rather discommoded by this coat, a fact cheerfully disregarded by the designer at Topshop, who doesn't mind in the slightest that you'll look like The Thing From The Deep getting on the number 14 bus, trailing seaweed and noisome marine detritus.  Still , it should shut up the singing bus chav for a bit.

Drudge, grudge and sludge

This dress is described on Topshop's website as 'Hidden Bird Maxi Dress', which is apt as you will indeed be quite well obscured by it.  Unless you are a man.  Then it would be called the Hidden Bloke Maxi Dress.

My Nanna would have worn a floral housecoat when doing the housework, back in the mid-20th century when everything was apparently dirtier.  Clearly, then, it is just the thing for Topshop's demographic, which seems to have veered from the usual twenty-somethings, to 1950s northern housewives, irritated that their newly-scrubbed bath is about to be sullied by coal again.

Topshop, £95.  Eee, there'll be trouble at t'mill.