Learn how to master tricky February dressing with our fashion expert

• From waterproof boots to invisible jackets: this winter’s wardrobe essentials

I am fond of February. It means January is over, which is cause for celebration already. The end-of-season sale rails have gone, so shop windows are again a source of new ideas. The weather is still rubbish, obviously, but the light is coming back: with a pinch of luck, you may even see daylight on the way home from the office by the end of February. The first snowdrops are nearly here. I like Valentine’s Day, which I know is deeply uncool of me, but I like pink and I like chocolate, so what’s not to love?

But February can be a challenge to dress for. The novelty of snuggly knits and shiny boots has well and truly worn off at this point, and maintaining enthusiasm for cold-weather dressing is a chore. Please keep reading for a puffer coat update and a fresh layering formula, not to mention a top-tier edit of the most delectable and affordable treats I’ve scouted from February’s shelves. No time to waste, my friends: another good thing about February is that it’s only 28 days long. Let’s hear it for a month that’s not just short, but also surprisingly sweet.

From dancers to divas, amputees to activists: what images of the human form throughout the decades tell us about who we are

There is no image more compelling to us than to see another human being naked. Thousands of years of evolution and desire, of empathy and curiosity, hardwire us to stare. The sight is visceral, electrifying, irresistible. It is familiar and forbidden; innocence and sin. The naked body is there in the bathroom mirror every morning, but to see another always feels like stumbling on a secret. A salt-twist of narcissism heightens our emotions, so that looking at a nude feels very different from admiring a watercolour landscape. Ethics come into it. In the history of portraiture, it is the nudes that are the most honest, or the most exploitative – or sometimes both.

Photographs are part of the fabric of everyday life for all of us, in a way charcoal sketches or oil paintings are not. So when a nude is not a sketch or a painting but a photograph, the intensity ratchets up. The polite distance of the art gallery experience is stripped away, leaving gut reaction and raw emotion. All of which is to say: nothing like a nude photograph to get you by the jugular.