Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Elsie Tanner, the flame-haired temptress of 1960s Coronation Street, 19-year-old Princess Beatrice this week launched her new career as a catwalk model by posing with her red tresses up in rollers.

The image of the Queen's grand-daughter apparently caught in flagrante was deemed so sensational that she was plastered all over the media. One can only conclude that picture editors up and down the country have not cottoned on to the fact that old-fashioned curlers are currently the height of fashion and thus nothing to be ashamed of.

The absence of a cover-up hair net or chiffon scarf is testimony to curlers' current chic, as is the fact that vintage self-grip hair rollers are currently selling fast on eBay. It also explains the copycat behaviour of Beatrice's 48-year-old mother, the Duchess of York, who allowed herself to be photographed hair-up alongside her daughter prior to their surprise Dolce and Gabbana debuts in the grand finale of London Fashion Week.

She should surely have known that the hottest fashion trends, especially those that expose the face, are only for the young. When that well-known 21-year-old Wag Coleen McLoughlin, fiancee of footballer Wayne Rooney and thus by modern definition a fashion icon, was spotted in the street last week with her long hair held up by green and red hair rollers, she looked fresh-faced, fabulous and not at all fazed. By contrast, the older and wiser 47-year-old television personality Jonathan Ross reportedly wears his in the privacy of his dressing before going on air.

The look is probably a post-ironic nod to the 1960s, the decade long plundered by designers desperate for inspiration and best captured by Marilyn Monroe. The difference this time around is that curlers - including hairgrips à la Beatrice - are used on long hair rather than short, to create the softly undulating "just out of bed" look sported by almost every catwalk model on the planet during the show season. Medium-sized rollers, of course, give more fullness, while larger curlers give less fullness but more softness.

In the fickle world of fashion, it was only a matter of time before GHD (Good Hair Day) straighteners lost favour. Only last season they were the must-have item for stylists everywhere, but now they appear to have been consigned to the recycling bin of fashion history.

In our environmentally-aware age, contemporary curlers have the added bonus of being energy-efficient, don't need to be plugged into an energy source and don't require chemicals. Used correctly, the stylist should not need hairspray to fix the resulting curl.

By giving their purpose a modern make-over, contemporary stylists have helped curlers shed their unwelcome connotations. These no doubt have their roots in the early days of the Toni permanent rinse, when the rollers were small, mean affairs that clasped the hair painfully tight. The result was the pensioner pom-pom. You weren't supposed to need curlers after a perm but the result was usually so frizzy and unmanageable that their application was absolutely necessary. Even then, curlers were far from pain-free: the self-grip versions used hidden brush spikes that pranged the scalp as they held on for dear life. EBay fans and wannabe catwalk queens beware: sometimes being fashionably retro is enough to make your hair curl.