The summer dress in its last three weeks
It is still 90 degrees and the shops are full of wool. Here is how to keep wearing what you own.
Built on: Any cotton or linen summer dress, and flat sandals.
Mid-August is a genuinely awkward moment. The clothes that work are the ones you have been wearing since June and are slightly bored of, and everything new in the shops is for a season that has not arrived. Accessories are the only honest solution, because they are the only thing that can make an existing dress feel different without pretending it is October.
The move is to lean fully into the summer accessories rather than half-shifting to autumn ones. A woven bag, shell or bead jewellery, a scarf in your hair — these are all at their end-of-season price right now and they will make a dress you have worn twenty times read as a deliberate look rather than a default one. Reaching for a leather bag and gold jewellery in this heat just makes the dress look stranded.
The one autumn-facing adjustment worth making is at the shoulders. Evenings are turning, and a large scarf or light wrap carried over an arm changes the whole outfit from beachwear to something you can eat dinner in. It also means the dress keeps working for another month.
On proportion: a floaty dress can take a lot of accessory volume — big beads, a big bag, a lot of hair — where a fitted one cannot. If the dress is close to the body, pick one thing and keep the rest small.
