TikTok holds thousands of videos promising to help you dress according to your natal chart. Astrology hashtags count billions of views. Generations born among algorithms and artificial intelligence are looking at stars again to work out who they are - and that fact is worth more than the trend itself.

Maria Moreta, who works as an image consultant, explains it through saturation. "We live in an era of endless scrolling where everything happens on a click, with visual stimulation that lasts a very short time," she says. The answer to that is not more content, but the search for something that outlasts a single season.

Her argument is that new generations do not want a campaign telling them how they should look. They want a tool that confirms something about themselves. Whether a horoscope is that tool is another question - but the need behind it is real and has nothing to do with stars.

What is interesting in her method is that it runs the opposite way to classic style advice. A stylist works from the outside in - height, complexion, body shape. Moreta says she starts from the inside out: from the emotional base towards colours, textures and cuts.

If you are going to look at a chart, she says, the sun sign is not enough. "That is like running a blood test and reading only the sugar" - a sentence that demolishes half the horoscope-column industry in one line. According to her, three things carry everything: the ascendant as first impression, Venus as taste and relationship to beauty, and the Moon as what you wear when nobody is watching.

That last one is the most usable part of the whole story, whether or not you believe in astrology. The clothes you reach for on a bad day are not random, and they rarely have anything to do with what looks good. They are shelter, and most people know exactly which item that is.

History is on the side of those who laugh at fashion over this. The Babylonians structured the zodiac more than 2,500 years ago. In Greece and Rome rulers used natal charts to legitimise power. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance astrology was taught at universities. None of this is new - the only new thing is that now there is an app.

In fashion the connection is even more concrete. Elsa Schiaparelli put stars and planets on her designs in the thirties and forties when that broke with everything. Christian Dior went to a tarot reader before every major decision, and it was she who encouraged him to open his own house - his comment was that he bowed before such a categorical claim, or rather, made peace with it. His number was eight: he opened the house in the eighth arrondissement of Paris, in a building of eight floors.

Coco Chanel held on to the number five and built it into everything, including the perfume that still carries the number in its name. Two people who shaped modern fashion worked with personal superstitions, and nobody called it a trend back then.

Does that mean a natal chart will solve your wardrobe question? No. But the question standing behind all of this - why am I buying this, whose taste is it, do I like it or was I told I like it - is better than any advice the industry sells.