London Calling: My Summer Season Dilemmas

Last Thursday I went to the Royal Ascot Ladies’ Day as a guest of my friend Stephen Jones and won £70—my first bet ever—on the Queen’s horse. Score! I stood at the rails and watched her four-year-old filly, Estimate, charge into the lead in the last seconds of the race. Hurrah! The stands roared. Top hats were thrown in the air. In her entire reign, Her Majesty had never looked more thrilled and smiley as when she patted that horse on the muzzle in the winner’s enclosure. They say it was an historic moment at Royal Ascot—he first time a British monarch had won the Gold Cup, and in the sixtieth anniversary of her coronation.
It was an historic moment for me, too. It’s the first time I’ve managed to feel okay about what I was wearing at the races. Royal Ascot is just one of the many sartorial minefields of the summer formalwear-dressing hurdles that face a woman like me. There are rules. There is weather. There are hats. It’s often hard-going underfoot. One is visible, and critiqued for compliance and chic, within the conservative circumstances. How to get around it?
This year, I found my lucky solution at John Rocha, the father of the young London designer, Simone. I wore John’s pink organza meringue of a hat in this picture, but with a cream lace calf-length dress from his store in Dover Street, covered up with an ivory Martin Margiela tuxedo jacket that I’ve saved for years. I trotted out on the train from London in a pair of Céline sandals (complete agony, by day’s end). Many were the women who were limping home, barefoot, carrying their shoes, on the return journey.
But here’s the issue: Society summer dressing—in the day—is whole different number from getting yourself up for the fashion show circuit. The latter, I am used to. Evening and cocktail in all their permutations are well catered to on the runways. Going to shows, you can do your thing with searing color, with pants, with the witty sweatshirt and clashing bag. But when your thing has to be tempered by various permutations of formality? When you want to fit in, courteously, yet be fashionable and still feel like yourself? Ooh, that’s difficult.
What you need to “pass” are all sorts of things I now realize I overlooked on the spring runways, but wish I’d paid more attention to now. Cream, white, and pale pastel dresses somehow didn’t seem so relevant in March, but some designers, like Clare Waight Keller at Chloé, were thinking well ahead. So, I now come to find, was Christopher Kane. Mostly, his gaffer-tape and pink rubber dresses made the news, but surprisingly he was in there with plenty of the formal-yet-edgy daywear too.
Lesson? When panicked for a solution, broaden your field of vision. Going back to study Jil Sander—another designer I wouldn’t expect to cover summery daytime formality—I see how comfortable I could feel standing around clinking champagne glasses on a lawn in these tailored pieces. Swap the boots for heels, and these would be perfect:
L’Wren Scott is another one who absolutely knows what she’s doing when it comes to designing within the apparently narrow confines of socially appropriate dressing. How impossible would it be to have a boring, wall-flowery day as a wedding guest if you sashayed in wearing any of these?Another designer I now wish I’d placed an early bet on is Bouchra Jarrar. I’m a natural trouser-wearer. Her sartorial negotiations between simplicity, elegance, and just-enough decorative prettiness are at perfect pitch.
Alas, unless you hit lucky in the sales, all these summer recommendations have probably disappeared by now. Nil desperandum. These days, there’s always another mini-season to fill the gaps. In the pre-fall collections, due in July, Erdem’s new ideas about daytime floral dressing (and some nice solid color frocks) are on the way.
Most of all, though, I find myself poring over these photographs from Raf Simons’s Christian Dior pre-fall. The French have never veered from their innate knowledge of the kind of restraint that, paradoxically, makes a woman stand out in a crowd. Now that Simons has come along to modernize it, I can’t help thinking how much I’d like to be part of it. http://www.kissyprom.co.uk/prom-dresses-under-100-online