What Endures, When the Days Grow Long

Notes for the season ahead — Summer 2026

Every year, at about this time, I am asked what will be fashionable come summer. I never quite know how to answer. The honest reply is that I have spent the better part of fifty years paying as little attention to that question as I can manage, and have dressed rather well for the trouble of ignoring it.

What I can tell you is what I shall be reaching for when the mornings turn warm, and why. None of it is new. That is rather the point.

Linen, and its forgivable creases

When the heat arrives I wear linen and very little else. Good linen, the heavy, slubbed sort that only softens and improves with washing, not the thin stuff that goes limp by noon. It creases, of course it creases, and a certain kind of woman finds this intolerable. I have never understood her. A linen dress that has rumpled through a long afternoon looks more beautiful at six o'clock than it did at nine. It has lived a little. So have you.

This season I have had us cut the linen a touch looser through the body; easy to move in, easy to sit down in, made to skim rather than cling. A dress you can spend a morning in the garden in and still wear to lunch.

On colour, or the quiet absence of it

People expect a summer to arrive with its colours announced. This year's coral, next year's green. We have never worked that way. Our palette in the warm months is the one the season hands us on its own: ecru, stone, oat, the faded indigo of cloth that has seen sun, a soft and dusty olive. Whites that are not quite white.

These are not exciting colours, and I am glad of it. They suit nearly everyone, they sit together without any effort on your part, and they will look precisely as right in ten summers as they do in this one. A woman in well-cut stone trousers and a fine white shirt is never wrongly dressed. I would stake the house on it.

The pieces worth the trouble

I am asked, more often than you would think, where a woman should begin if she is building a summer wardrobe from nothing. My answer tends to disappoint, because I would not begin with very much at all.

A linen dress, cut simply. A pair of wide trousers in cotton or linen, the kind that move when you walk. One excellent white shirt, properly made, with sleeves you can roll to the elbow. A knit fine enough for cool evenings near the water. And something light to throw over your shoulders when the sun drops — we make an unstructured jacket for exactly that hour.

That is very nearly all of it. Five or six things, chosen carefully and kept for years, will carry you through every warm month far more gracefully than a wardrobe bought new each season and forgotten by the next. The woman who looks effortless in summer is almost always the woman who owns less, not more.

A word on the sun, and on restraint

The warm months tempt people into excess — more skin, more colour, more of everything, as though summer were a thing to be won. I have always thought the opposite. Heat is the season for wearing less, in every sense. Less fuss, less ornament, less trying altogether. A good cloth, a clean line, bare ankles, and the quiet confidence to let that be enough.

That confidence, in the end, is the only thing I have ever really sold. The clothes are simply how it reaches you.

I hope your summer is a long and unhurried one.

Yours beautifully,

-Eleanor