Someone appears to have tipped a party over the entire accessories market. Little discs of colour are landing on shoes, hats, bags and everything in between, scattered in mismatched sizes and clashing shades as though caught mid-flight. Fashion calls it the confetti print, and it has become the season’s most cheerful contagion. The clue sits in the name. Confetti began life in Italy as the confetto, a sugared almond flung at weddings and carnival crowds for centuries. The paper version arrived in nineteenth-century Milan, where an enterprising local started selling the leftover paper discs punched out during silkworm breeding, and revellers happily threw those instead. A word born from celebration has spent the summer behaving exactly like one.

Polka Dots Grew Up and Dressed Up for Good

Understanding the distinction matters here. The polka dot took its name from a dance craze that swept nineteenth-century ballrooms, and it has behaved with impeccable manners ever since, marching across fabric in tidy, evenly spaced rows, disciplined as a school assembly. Minnie Mouse wore it. Princess Diana wore it. Yayoi Kusama built an entire artistic universe out of it. Confetti dots inherited that DNA and promptly misbehaved. They land wherever they please, varying wildly in scale, jostling for space and rarely agreeing on a colour scheme. One spot might be the size of a coin while its neighbour looks like a pinhead, and the eye keeps travelling because the rhythm keeps changing. Then there is the palette, which is where the whole thing turns intoxicating. This season’s dots arrive in shades that sound invented, all maraschino red and marmalade orange, lemon-sorbet yellow beside swimming-pool blue, pistachio green flirting with grape-soda purple and bubblegum pink. The effect lands somewhere between a childhood sweet shop and a very expensive gelateria, which is precisely the fantasy fashion has been chasing since beige lost its grip.

From Margiela Tabis to Jacquemus Full Looks

Maison Margiela delivered the accessory of the moment with its Confetti Print Tabi ballet flats, available in glossy white leather or a transparent PVC jelly finish, with multicoloured spots freckling that unmistakable cloven toe. Devotees of the house will recognise the reference, since Tabi ankle boots in yellow confetti appeared in the archive back in autumn 2003. Then came the moment that sent the print global. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, Demi Moore arrived at the jury photocall in Jacquemus, wearing a strapless cream dress speckled with red, blue, black and yellow dots. Many of those dots sat on the ends of fine wisps, so they hovered above the fabric and floated whenever she moved, finished with a cinched waist and a tulip skirt courtesy of stylist Brad Goreski. Simon Porte Jacquemus had described the mood behind the collection in the simplest terms, saying he wanted everyone “to have fun.” Mission accomplished. The print has since scattered across summer accessories with real enthusiasm, freckling raffia totes, straw hats, silk scarves knotted around handles and ponytails, plus the odd pair of jelly sandals. Styling it takes very little effort, since one confetti piece against a plain linen dress or white denim does the entire job. Wear the dots, skip the beige, let your handbag look like it just came from a birthday.