Summer Style Is a Fabric Problem

#

Start with what it’s woven from

#

Polyester and standard cotton hold heat against you. The summer fabrics don’t:

• Linen — the foundation. Shirts in solids and stripes will carry most of the season.
• Seersucker — that puckered texture keeps the cloth off your skin, and it takes colour beautifully.
• Egyptian cotton — finer and more breathable than the everyday stuff.
• Tropical wool — much lighter than normal wool and the answer if you still need a suit in July.

Get this right and everything after it is easier, because you’re no longer fighting the material.

Then let some colour in

#

Plenty of men wear navy and black straight through the year, which is a waste of the one season that forgives more.

Light blue, pink, yellow, light grey, turquoise, dark green. Pastels tend to work well on fairer complexions. And linen and seersucker hold colour more richly than synthetics do, so the same shade simply looks better in the right cloth.

Sleeves, collars, and the short-sleeve question

#

Roll long sleeves to the elbow rather than buying short-sleeved shirts. Very few men look good in a short sleeve without a fair amount of arm behind it, and a rolled sleeve keeps the proportions and lets you put a jacket over the top.

On collars, summer is the moment to leave the tie at home — or wear a textured one, knitted silk or a linen blend. Worth trying a Cuban or camp collar, or a buttonless polo, which sits surprisingly well under a jacket.

The rest

#

• White trousers. Chinos, linen, or jeans, roughly between late spring and early autumn. They go with a navy jacket, with seersucker, or as part of an all-white look. You will be more careful about where you sit and they’ll need cleaning more often. Still worth it.
• Suede loafers. Leather gets unpleasant in heat. Suede is lighter and moves from daytime to evening without comment. Break them in wearing socks before going without, and skip the invisible no-show socks — they cut off circulation and slide down anyway.
• Accessories. Swap the plain leather belt for braided leather or cotton, which looks right with white trousers. A bracelet or two on the wrist opposite your watch. And a NATO strap instead of a metal bracelet, which Sean Connery did with a Submariner long before it was a trend.
• Fragrance. Lighter than whatever you wear in winter — fresh, citrus, aquatic. Cool Water is inexpensive and still good; Acqua di Parma Colonia has been worn by better-dressed men than any of us for about a century.

On shorts

#

Fine in daylight. The hem must not go past the knee, and an inseam somewhere between five and nine inches covers most people.

The rule worth keeping is that shorts are a daytime item. Dinner means trousers, even when it’s still warm out — which sounds fussy until you notice how much better everyone looks in the evening for it.

A few small things to try

#

• Buy one linen shirt before buying anything else
• Roll your sleeves instead of reaching for a short-sleeved shirt
• Try one colour you’d normally avoid, in linen rather than cotton
• Change out the metal watch bracelet for a NATO strap and see how much lighter it feels