Blanc canvas; Model citizen; Woman of the hour; In common; All for one; Curated by: Lucy Folk.

The white dress is no longer a simple mainstay. With a cleansing power, it is a shortcut to dressing with feeling. By Alice Birrell.

WHEN MIUCCIA PRADA brought white cotton into the fold for resort ’20, she meant it as more than just a polite breather. “The opposite of pretentious,” she said backstage. “It’s simplicity as a protest against too much.” It was yet another Prada-ism that articulates a sentiment she somehow knows we’re all feeling: at the beginning of a year, we want to strip it all away – the distractions and the fripperies – to find cherishable, enduring clothing.

Enter the white dress. Prada’s version had the purity of a girlish smock. Dior’s came out in a beguiling set of four column dresses in porcelain crochet. Gabriela Hearst, Erdem and Zimmermann did signature prairie-meets-Victorian with a holiday ease. Each evinced an all-in-one simplicity with the unassuming air of a breezy clear day.

This time around, though, it is a convergence of everything fashion is pointing to right now. A dress to keep – don’t mistake it for the summer slip-on – this is a luxurious species, not to be besmirched with sunscreen and sand. It can also artfully incorporate the handmade, celebrating authentic skill, the warmth in the handhewn. Like Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen for spring/summer ’20, who was inspired by London’s Stitch School and had sweeping gowns the colour of clotted cream hand-stitched.

She is among designers devoting swathes of their collections entirely to white, re-examining the connotations that come with it – Valentino, Gucci, Alexander McQueen – the former’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli citing its universality, using it, he told reporters backstage, to “get back to the essence of shape and volume”.

Clearing away distractions of colour can result in refined, uncomplicating dressing.

It is something Nikki Campbell, co-founder of Sir The Label, whose first collection was all white, realises. “There is nothing more versatile than a white dress,” she says. “It embodies a feeling of summer and has a timeless appeal.” Most of all it seems an unbleached white speaks of authenticity, something in its natural state – the soft cloud-white of cotton, the milky shade of spun silk before it is dyed. In the spirit of Miuccia Prada, think of it as a total summer reset and add little else. There’s strength in having the confidence to choose simplicity.