SPRING-SPECIFIC RULES TO FOLLOW,
COURTESY OF STYLE POET SIMON MILLS
When TS Eliot wrote about April being “the cruellest month” in The Waste Land, I’m pretty sure he was musing not on the pathos of a change of seasons underscoring the author’s own advancing years, the ennui of a reduced libido and the lament of lost loves bringing into sharp focus the inevitable, inexorable slide towards dessication and decrepitude, but actually, the very tricky problem of “nailing” one’s spring/summer wardrobe.
Eliot bemoaned the myriad problems a man faces when “breeding lilacs out of the dead land” ie, making the jump from the dour, heavy equipment of wool overcoats to the dainty weightlessness of Miami Vice pastels. “Winter kept us warm…” Eliot wrote, “Summer surprised us.” Clearly a reference to the warp and weft of seasonally adjusted trouser material and the journey from brogue to loafer.
April, May and June are indeed the cruellest months for a man’s attire because, despite the entirely predictable meteorological cycle of weather growing ever temperate and a sartorial modification being required, the capriciously tepid onslaught of a British spring induces in us a sense of mild panic. Summer ensembles are easier-going but harder to pull off. One minute it is cold and grey, the next the sky is blue and the sun is shining. One day every inch of us is all butch, wrapped up and murdered out like Jason Statham in a Cold War shoot-’em-up, the next we are denuding our joints and extremities — elbows, wrists, ankles, napes, sternums — like a care-free, polo-shirted, sockless, push-biking Armie Hammer.
Winter is for hibernating, graft and isolation. Spring and summer are for indolence, sex and flirting. (“Love and sun are feminine,” muses Jules in Truffaut’s New Wave classic Jules et
Jim.) But the transition is not always a smooth and painless seduction. In the colder months, we can conceal our blotchy, flabby imperfections behind an insulating carapace of down, scarves, boots and high-necked woollens. Warm weather attire — lighter, thinner, made from less material and more peacocking colours — can be cruelly exposing, leaving us and our various flaws and blemishes nowhere to hide.
Hot weather posed few problems for our grandfathers. They wore the same thing — suit, shirt, tie, waistcoat — all year round, simply removing a jacket or rolling up a sleeve when the sun was shining; taking off a sock and turning up a trouser hem when it was time for a paddle. But sometime in the Eighties, things (and trousers) changed. Cheap air fares and package holidays democratised international travel. Young British men could suddenly afford to get proper tans, eat paella and wear lime green espadrilles. George Michael became the first pop star to wear shorts on Top of the Pops.
Modern, fashionable types began to dress to match the summer lifestyles to which they
aspired (or actually achieved): boho-ish Ibicencan whites and LA electric blues; the powder pinks of the art deco stucco on Miami’s South Beach; the salty bone clapboard of Hamptons holiday homes; the posh, French grey of a Cote d’Azur château; the Aperol umber and chilled rosé of the Italian Riviera. These are the Caprese salad and Neapolitan ice cream colours of summer that gently feminise and Euro-ise us once the temperature rises above stand-offish and heads towards priapic.
But before you go full Sonny Crockett with your lemon scoop necks and eau de Nil linens, be warned. A man needs to be extra careful with pastels. Tonally and culturally speaking, there is fine line between Billionaire Boys Club and the paddock at the Chelsea Flower Show; and a wannabe Pharrell is only an erroneous pleat and an uninformed belt choice away from a blowsy Titchmarsh.
So, on the right, a few rules.