We can’t talk about the butterfly without first considering the caterpillar: Maya Angelou noted “we delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty”. One of four stages in a butterfly’s year-long lifecycle (in cold locations, it may take several), the caterpillar’s primary focus is eating, cramming its mandibles with leaves, shedding its overstuffed skin five or six times as it grows up to 100 times bigger than when it emerged from its egg. That accomplishment is the result of the butterfly’s complex mating ritual, a tail-to-tail copulation lasting minutes to hours, often aerial and involving pheromones. The painted and perfumed ladies lay sculptural eggs, fixing them to leaves of nutritious plants (nature’s all-you-can-eat salad bars) with special butterfly superglue. From bingeing to starvation, when the fattened larva spins the cocoon within which it will digest itself prior to pupal transformation, we wonder if larvae, like some of us, amass racks of silken garments in a range of sizes.

Metamorphosis is fraught with judgement: caterpillar bad, butterfly good. Kathryn Schultz (staff writer at The New Yorker) in her NY Times guest essay How to Make Sense of Our Covid Losses, Big and Small, muses on how our world is necessarily filled with and-ness; “the way it requires us to experience so many contradictory or unrelated things all at once”. Perhaps the pandemic has illuminated our existence as both diving bell and butterfly: “The world we inhabit is full of splendour and misery, our fellow humans are brilliant and inspiring and selfish and vicious, and we ourselves are hopelessly motley, full of mixed motives and mixed feelings.”

If psychoanalysis employs dream interpretation as a therapeutic technique, then a personal stylist may be able to assess and heighten our state of play by analysing and editing our closets, encouraging room in our wardrobes for transition: a Moncler Genius puffer with impeccable bedside manner can hang alongside (at a squeeze) a belly-baring Blumarine SS22 denim butterfly baby tee, a throwback to Mariah Carey’s career-defining Ungaro almost-there bra top. Or a demure Aqua Bendita linen maxi dress, its tidy bodice and floaty skirt appliquéd with monarch flutterbys, patiently awaiting our moulting, shedding two years of fluffy onesies, paired with Miu Miu butterfly sunglasses – sun’s out!

As we emerge from the pandemic’s latency, butterflies are everywhere; no coincidence we migrate to the manicured gardens of Malahide Castle’s Butterfly House, to marvel at the 20 species of lovely Lepidoptera floating like Ali among hothouse flowers. Cocooned for what feels like forever, deprived of colour and flight, dark cafés and glittery cocktail bars, we await our gorgeous wings to fly away, or at least a pair of sophisticated Sophia Webster slingback pumps in black suede, gold-stitched wings sidling up to coy toe cleavage.

The beauty and savagery of the natural world infused Alexander McQueen’s work with dark imaginings, the butterfly’s effect a convulsion in which transition is anything but pretty. McQueen recognised the brutality of becoming, and as we prepare to re-enter a changed world, we’d be wise to look to Irish folklore, where butterflies – “souls of the dead” – navigate their way to the Otherworld. @susanzelouf

1. I’M ALL aflutter in Philip Treacy’s Butterfly headdress for Alexander McQueen’s 2008 “La Dame Bleue” collection.

2. I’M TAKING wing in golden Ella earrings. €158; www.jenniferbehr.com.

3. I’M CROWNING my glory in Jennifer Behr’s golden butterfly Pippa bobby pins.

4. I’M TILING with Victorian-inspired lepidopterist tiles by fashion designer Mary Katrantzou for Villeroy & Boch.

5. I’M EMBRACING change in an 18k gold enamelled monarch ring; www.ross-simons.com.

6. I’M ORDERING a Jaded London butterfly print white denim jacket from the www.asos.com outlet before it flies out the door!

7. I’M COLLECTING Christian Lacroix Butterfly Parade porcelain dinnerware; www.luxdeco.com.

8. I’M SUNNING in Gemma butterfly shades by Chloé.

9. I’M LEAVING a scent trail of Orange Butterflies from Jo Loves, created by Jo Malone.

10. I’M FALLING for Sophia Webster’s butterfly slingbacks, available in many hues.

11. I’M PUTTING an Aesthetic Butterflies hat on my bucket list; www.hyperfavor.com. 

12. I’M BROACHING the subject of birthdays with a diamond pin from Brereton Jewellers, 33 Grafton Street.

13. I’M LUNCHING in a Jil Sander butterfly-print midi dress.

14. I’M RINGING in the Lunar New Year in Dior sneakers.

15. I’M BRAGGING on our own Butterfly tables, if you don’t mind. www.zeloufandbell.com.