As we approach what's set to be a stellar summer, when it comes to home entertainment our small screen alternatives unfortunately lie somewhere between Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Walker, Texas Ranger. Of course, as many TV villains can testify, no one ever sees Chuck Norris coming. Or at least not until it's too late and he kicks you in the face.

So, amid the kitsch, cheese and hokey acting, it's understandable one quality drama is causing a lot of excitement. Despite an impressive 17 Emmy nominations and consistently impressive season figures, the Mad Men stir has arisen particularly for its fashion.

With around two millions viewers tuning in, Mad Men is starting a revival trend which is catching on. Visually distinctive, Mad Men's style firmly flaunts the swank of the early 1960s - combining starched elegance, architecturally-complex underwear and suits sharp enough to cut through boardroom tension. The success of the Mad Men style is down to the obsessive attention to detail, which almost fetishises the 1960s backdrops.

As much as Sex & the City could be enjoyed with the mute button on for the designer clothes and Patricia Field's sometimes quizzical styling, Mad Men's aesthetics are an intoxicating dip into a decade still considered alluring, romantic and stylish (at least if you can overlook the sexism and anti-Semitism). Now, it may be a matter of perfect timing, but the 1960s have rarely been so readily evoked. From Obama's JFK style appeal to Carla Bruni being crowned as the new Jackie O (at least until her autobiography was released).

The retro aesthetic has now subtly crept into the clothes I've seen in New York, London, Milan and Paris, all of which can be broadly categorised into two strong trends. The first, best defined by Tom Ford's and Marc Jacobs' latest collections, is for a celebration of womanliness that allows us to use traditional wiles and graceful curves to catch the eye of the objects of our affection - and all their friends. What I like about these lines is that if you haven't got it, you can fake it. Whether its extra fabric bullet pleated for greater bust potential or bottoms given the same treatment by pretty skirts caught into soft bustles across the back.

The second category is for absolute, supreme, take-your-breath-away quality - the likes of which has possibly only previously been witnessed on haute couture catwalks. It can be simply done, in fact. Phoebe Philo set a benchmark with her Spring/Summer 2010 show for considered, refined shapes that was taken as a cue by several of her contemporaries and deliciously revisited by her again on the Céline catwalk. Simple but not clinical, since the fabrics are luxurious to the point of genius - embellished with jewels, threaded with rich embroidery, pleated and draped and with different textures spun together as if by magic, it's paired down into crisp shapes but whipped up high in value.

As the retro revolution continues to find its place in fashion once more, canny eBay sellers are already heavily marketing vintage clothes, re-branding them as ‘Mad Men-style'. Still, it's not just the thrill of retro; the ‘Mad Men effect' is talked about for raising the sales of everything from tortoise shell glasses to fedoras, while the stars of the show skip from the pages of Vanity Fair to GQ to Vogue.

I must say that the most prominent example of the Mad Men effect is the return of the sharp suit. Some of the influence is subtle - higher waistbands, shorter jackets - while others are near rip-offs of the designs. US designer Michael Kors' latest collection has been so heavily inspired by Mad Men that you get a free boxset with purchases over $350 - but unlike a Chuck Norris kick in the face, we could all see the boxset coming. So, while television shows have a history of prompting fashion trends, what's interesting is this time it's the men who are absorbing and replicating the style more than the women.

However, it isn't just fashion arena where Mad Men has its influence. The highly literary show (the creator cites John Cheever and J.D. Salinger as setting the show's tone) showed a collection of poetry in the latest season premiere - Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency - it jumped instantly from 15,000 in Amazon's bestseller list to 150 and the site ran out of copies. Whether the show will also cause a run of boozy lunches, chain smoking, and casual misogyny remains to be seen.

Bella Beauty Magazine