Your summer style self is just you, sweating

Here’s my latest style column for July’s Critic, should anyone fancy a look (the issue is on shelf now, packed with good stuff). As for the pictures, behold my other top tip for clammy, less than sparkling moments: an outstanding hat. These are all by my beloved pal, couturier Victoria Grant. Although, as regular readers will know, I also boast £2.99 incarnations picked up from charity shop floors.

For not only do hats conceal my lack of hair nous, they provide an expression of my true, heart’s-desire self. Witness this slice of wisdom from self-created legend, milliner Lilly Dache: “A woman’s hat is close to her heart, though she wears it on her head. It is her way of saying to the world: ‘See, this is what I am like’.” VG’s tifters are me at the very top of my game.

Because of this, they are the ultimate fillip when less than chipper and needing to get the show on the road. Compare our own Stephen Jones: “Hats are a great antidote to what’s going on. It’s really their purpose to put a happy face on a sad world”. Sad, and I would add, sweaty; Victoria’s sequin-bedecked, champagne veils obscuring a multitide of sins. When I am a sadsack void with nothing, but nothing to say, my headpiece semaphores personality. To quote novelist Martha Sliter: “A piece of magic is a hat.”

Anyway, on with the column…

I’ve spotted a fair few fashion articles referring to one’s “summer self” of late. Friends, I have news. You’re British: your summer self is the same as your winter self only sweatier and more enervated. Fall for this summer self schtick and you’ll end up with a glut of shapeless, Club Tropicana tat that looks care-in-the-community even when supine, pink drink in hand. Still, as I have previously opined, discovering one’s fundamental, all-weather style self is crucial in order that one’s every morning isn’t the occasion for existential crise.

The latest intervention in this field issues from fashion therapist turned spiritual guru Erin Walsh, whose work carries her between New York, La La Land and wherever else her celebrity clients stray. Walsh’s day job involves aiding “soulmate friend” Anne Hathaway, Selena Gomez and Kerry Washington compose ‘fits. To extend this wisdom to a planetary scale, she has composed a tome, The Art of Intentional Dressing; “intentional” being the buzz adjective the young people deploy where you and I might say “deliberate”.

Walsh’s aim is to produce nothing less than an “intentional dressing Bible,” were said Bible accessorised by crystals, safe spaces and sundry shadow selves. If you are looking for a traditional how-to, this isn’t it. Style, Walsh maintains, is “not about the clothes”. Indeed, she barely mentions any garment other than to establish that cashmere makes us feel “held,” while white induces serenity. (Possibly in “thought leaders”. In the rest of us, it may inspire anxieties around dry cleaning and the fear of being mistaken for some wannabe cult leader.)

Instead, Walsh’s mission is addressing – and dispelling – “the rampant dis-ease women have with their bodies”. Clothes “effect our vibrational frequency” with “subtle energies,” meanwhile “thoughts, actions, emotions and intentions create patterns of energy that interact with the energetic field in the environment”. This, we are informed, is “a lot of science,” which is one word for it.

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Obviously, I fucking loved it. Listening to our heroine narrate her philosophy on Audible was akin to immersing myself in a warm bath, a white cashmere of the mind, if you will. I felt serene, held. And I don’t believe in anything: God, pseudo-science, or the real deal. Reality itself strikes me as fundamentally unconvincing. Still, what is revolutionary about Walsh’s method is its focus not on how we look, but how we feel.

The ground zero of her approach is the “universal daily struggle” faced by women as they stand in front of their wardrobes. Too often this is a moment of monumental masochism: a self bitch-slapping of the soul involving panic responses such as: “What will I fit into?” or “What can I get away with?” Instead, Walsh proposes that we ask: “How am I feeling?” and “How do I want to feel?” Shouldn’t be radical; totally bloody is.

The problem for British women is threefold. First, we have weather: rando, increasingly erratic, borderline batshit weather that sees me sporting a polo-neck, fur jacket and hiking socks to write this - indoors, in June, heating on. Rain is battering against the window, wild animals pressed up against it pleading for sanctuary. So there’s that.

Second, I’m not sure Walsh is ready for the limited range British women aspire to in their style ambitions. How do I want to feel? Some days I’d settle for “human,” “adequate,” or “broadly female”. Finally, conclusively, if we were able to identify our feelings, would we, in fact, be British? Feelings are for Americans. We just bugger blindly on.

Plus, here’s the thing. Very often, I stand in front of my wardrobe wanting neither to think nor feel. In Walsh-speak, I lack the bandwidth. It’s why Obama deployed a closet of identical blue and grey suits, or home workers wallow in their pyjamas. They’re not being slovenly, they’re choosing not to engage. And the situation becomes so much worse in summer, what with everything so wilting, chief of all oneself.

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What is needed is a one-and-done. Easiest all round is a tent. I’ve got my eye on an Embroidered Maxi Dress in midnight blue cotton cheesecloth (£195.00, meandem.com). I’d describe it – approvingly – as a shroud with an eveningwear sensibility (lace about the neck and sleeves, waisted). In it, one would transform into one of those sophisticates going smartly about her business in furnace-like Italian cities: functional, put together, ascetic, yet chic. I know, I know, it’s from Me and Em, as it is so often from Me and Em. What can I say? They do good stuff.