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The Rolling Stones’ She’s Like a Rainbow has long been a catwalk soundtrack favourite. Lately, though, it seems designers have been taking the song far more literally.

Flourishes of psychedelia were a street-style hit during Australian fashion month, with Paula Cademartori handbags and striped Fendi monster backpacks dangling off shoulders. Meanwhile, Beyoncé has made a lasting commitment to Roy G Biv.

The global rainbow wave has demonstrated that kaleidoscopic clothing and accessories aren’t just for the Iris Apfels of the world. In How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran wrote that leopard print, gold sequins and silver lamé are “neutrals”, and a similar principle applies to rainbow designs. When you wear every colour at once, it doesn’t “go” with anything, which means the rainbow clothes in question come full circle and end up matching everything (even orange and olive green simultaneously).

Multicoloured accessories can be used to bring a joyous touch to an otherwise conservative black, white or navy outfit, or rainbow pieces can be piled on top of each otherfor a delightfully insane look.

While designers including Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino looked to Elmer the Patchwork Elephant for inspiration, and Mary Katrantzou took cues from 60s op art, Australian designers have looked to more organic muses to find their pots of gold.

For the Sydney-based designer Emma Mulholland, native birds and heatwave maps provided fruitful colour palettes. “I often look to animals and nature for inspiration,” she told Guardian Australia.

“I find there is so much to draw from, whether its colour combinations or funny animal traits. I find it all pretty fascinating and amusing.

“I think so many designers stop at leopard print or something basic but there are a lot more ways to use nature in design.”

The artist and fashion legend Linda Jackson introduced Romance Was Born to thediffracted beauty of opals this season, while her longtime friend and collaboratorJenny Kee was painted for the Archibald prize in varicoloured silks of her own creation, drawing on native flowers and desert sunsets.

The rainbows Australian designers have been producing are less clean and precise than their international counterparts. This point of difference is in an advantage. Rather than being explicitly tied to the flower-child moment that is gripping the fashion world more broadly, Mulholland, Romance Was Born and Kee’s colourful creations feel more timeless than 2015-takes-on-1970. A piece like Bella Freud’s1970 jumper is literally designed to date, whereas a waratah and ying-yang patchwork is more eccentric than slyly retro.

While rainbow has the potential to tire the eye quickly, it also lasts. Buying a prismatic printed skirt for spring might only yield three or four wears this season, but unlike pieces that are in “good taste”, which tend to be influenced by the It silhouette or palette of the moment, something that looks fabulously garish now is likely to look fabulously garish three years from now, too.

Rainbow clothes are also a relatively cheap way to bring colour into your wardrobe. Unlike colour blocking, which requires full commitment and various garments (the yellow blouse, the fuchsia trousers and the aqua satchel all at once), like a shard of light through the clouds it only takes a little rainbow to create something beautiful.