When I’m having one of those moments when I can’t seem to find the perfect dress, it usually turns out the perfect dress has been eluding me because it wasn’t a dress at all. In 2016, I searched for my perfect dress all year, only to discover in mid-November that what I actually needed was a jumpsuit. And now, halfway through the summer of 2018, I realise my summery-but-not-floaty dress has been impossible to find because I should have been looking for a shirt and a skirt.
There’s probably a morality tale to be spun from here about what we think we want and what we need, but we don’t have time for that because, as I mentioned, it’s halfway through summer.
This summer is not short on great dresses. Far from it. It is, I would go so far as to say, a vintage year for the grownup summer dress. There is a certain type of dress – floral, but interestingly so, with good coverage, but a lightness that makes it feel dramatic rather than simply demure – that I am so charmed by that I bought about six and happily wore them on rotation for the first half of this year. But one day I began to fear the world had reached peak floral maxi. I looked around and had the uneasy revelation that what I had presumptuously thought to be my very own fashion GPS coordinates, somewhere between Boden and The Vampire’s Wife, was fashion’s new base camp. Pastures new were therefore required anon.
A skirt with a shirt doesn’t sound groundbreaking. When your go-to skirt was a knee-length pencil skirt, you probably wore it with, say, a silk blouse all the time. But the midi skirt length we have to wear now (it’s a bit more complex than that but, as I said, we don’t have long) has generally been presented with a polo neck, or a sweatshirt, or a slouchy T-shirt. None of which lend themselves naturally to summer workwear.
