Hello hello! How are you? My new novel All Grown Up is out next week, I’m really excited about it and I hope it will make you laugh and give you a big boost. I’d love to meet you. My Manchester Simply Books event is now sold out, but I’ll be at Simply Waterstones Trafalgar Square on 4 June, tickets here. It’s going to be lots of fun. If you’d like to come but you’re worried about being on your own, don’t be afraid! I love matchmaking and bringing together new, book loving friends, so I promise that I’ll find you. some pals on the night.
It’s hot. It’s very, very hot. And I don’t know what to wear. Every summer dress I see appears to have been designed to make me look like a minor character in the famously dowdy British sitcom One Foot In The Grave. I have a love-hate relationship with shorts. When I put them on, I look in the mirror and whisper to myself ‘Isn’t she brave?’ before spending the whole day, singing under my breath ‘Thighs thighs thighs thighs thighs thighs thighs thighs TH-TH-TH-THIGHS, TH-THIGHS!’
At 41, I’m not entirely sure what, or crucially who I want to look like. I should be chic, by now. I should be wafting about in crisp, clean linen. When I wear linen, I look as though I’ve spent the last three nights sleeping on a Megabus. I used to love shopping for new clothes and now the experience makes me feel like Grampa Simpson. Why is everything three hundred pounds and brown? I do not like anything anyone wears on Instagram. I could ask Chat GPT for style advice, but I’d rather pour itching powder into all of the clothes I already own, and wear them all at once. I’d prefer to spend the next four months dressed as Tobias from Arrested Development, covered in blue paint and wearing tiny denim cut-offs.
I realise that I’ve been looking for style inspiration in all the wrong places. I don’t want to look, or feel, like a forty something woman who can pull off linen. I want to feel like an imaginary teenager – someone who makes her own earrings, or knows her way around an internal combustion engine, or whose greatest ambition is to get off with Bruce Patman. So, here is my guide to summer fashion, courtesy of my YA heroines.
Claudia Kishi, The Babysitters’ Club
For the uninitiated, Claudia is the 12 year old vice president of the Babysitters’ Club. She has her own phone line – I don’t think it’s ever explained why the strict, academic, focused John and Rioko let their 12 year old daughter have her own phone line, but if you remember, please do write in. She’s also got an endless secret stash of junk food – again, how? Where from? Maybe her supplier was her grandmother, Mimi? No Babysitters’ Club book is complete without a mention of her stash, Twizzlers falling from high cupboards, Twinkies tucked under the bed. (These brands were very confusing and exciting for British readers.)
Claudia is an arty girl in an academic world – I think the first time I ever heard the word macramé was in reference to something she had made, or something she was wearing. Her style is a little bit brighter and looser than her chic best friend, New York city transplant Stacey McGill. To get the grown-up Claudia look, try LF Markey – these stripy overalls feel very Claudia coded. Make your own earrings, if you dare. But I don’t dare, I’d look for some giant, plastic primary coloured hoops. I also like this zebra huggie.
When I’m in a bad mood about getting dressed, and I feel hot and cross, I try to channel Petrova. Spiritually, I’m probably a Pauline (a bit too good at being nice to grown-ups, a predilection for velvet, and dark dresses with pale collars, a once-in-a-blue moon tendency to be an irredeemable brat) but Petrova is practical, and practised in the art of compromise. She’ll put up with various outlandish stage costumes, but all she really wants is an outfit with loose cuffs, so she can roll up the sleeves and get under a car bonnet. If I don’t know what to wear, and I’m feeling Petrova-ish, I’ll end up in dark jeans, a black tank, a big white shirt and a headscarf. Grown-up, twenty first century Petrova gets everything she needs from Uniqlo. (I think she’d like the men’s oversized Oxford from the JW Anderson collab.)
Jessica Wakefield, Sweet Valley High
The Wiki Fan page puts it perfectly: Jessica loves shopping, makeup, clothing and accessories, acting, being in the spotlight, gossiping with her closest girlfriends, teasing her brother, betraying her sister, cheerleading, and dating. How does one dress for that? Jessica is the Ultimate Summer Girl, and her greatest accessory is confidence. Honestly, it’s all we need, it will do even more for us than a lavalier pendant necklace, or a Fiat Spyder. Jessica is a product of the eighties, but her vibe is also kind of Y2K. For those who like that sort of thing, low rise jeans are very Jessica. (I could never, but go for your life.) If I were the wildest Wakefield, I’d wear this lilac linen minidress from Free People. (Students of the Francine Pascal universe will remember that in middle school, Jessica was a member of the exclusive Unicorn Club, a group of girls who demonstrated the fact that they were rich and fancy by wearing purple, the colour of royalty.) Or I’d hit up Vestiaire in search of a possible cast off from Jessica’s BFF, the ultra wealthy Lila Fowler. Oh, how I covet this Versace dress.
Rita Formica, Fat: A Love Story
Rita lives in Sag Harbour, a beach town in the Hamptons. She’s surrounded by people who are rich and thin. She isn’t rich, but she dreams of being thin – or maybe it’s her parents who dream of it for her, she isn’t sure. She thinks she’s in love with the glamorous, athletic Robert Swann – but her boss, the nerdy, poetry loving, unlikely cheesecake mogul Arnold Bromberg might be falling for her. When I discovered Rita, as a younger reader, I’d never, ever met any character whose feelings about her body were so like my own. And like Rita, I’d always imagined that in the unlikely event that anyone fell in love with me, it would be in spite of my body – unless I underwent a total physical transformation, in order to prove myself worthy of love. But Arnold believes that every single thing about Rita is beautiful. Rita deserves to feel beautiful, and elegant, and adult. I think the Nobody’s Child Audrey dress would be perfect for her, although she might have to tuck the skirt up somewhere when she’s riding her bike.
We’ve all lost hours and hours of our one wild and precious life to an infinite black hole of Insta reels exhorting us to ‘get the French girl look!’ This is entirely because of the novels of Françoise Sagan. Bonjour Tristesse is a vibe and a mood, and I’ve read it several times but all I really remember is the bit where they’re on their way to the casino, and Cécile’s father’s girlfriend is dressed up, but sunburned (‘the effect was more meticulous than brilliant’), and also that I’m always surprised by Cécile’s grumpiness, and the amount of yoga she does. It’s a mistake to think of Cécile as a young woman who wafts about in head to toe Sézane. (I’ve made that mistake. It was expensive.) The whole point of spending time with her clueless father is that she isn’t subjected to any maternal pressure to do bon chic, bon genre. If you met Cécile and asked her for her opinions on the perfect white shirt, I suspect she’d be so bored she’d try to drown you in a swimming pool.
Let’s assume that she’s a classic French teenager, who is in possession of a handful of immaculate clothes that she doesn’t really think about. Maybe someone has bought her one ‘good’ dress for her holiday, something like this Me+Em Perfect Basic Dress (I think her Dad might buy her this Ganni dress, in a misguided fit of poorly thought through indulgence. She wouldn’t like it. But I think that in 2026, Cecile might like a pair of Adidas Firebird shorts in Aurora Coffee. )
I’d love to hear about your YA summer style icons - I hope you’re staying cool and / or rediscovering some classic children’s literature! Love
Daisy x
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