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A hero fabric of the season, our summer closets just wouldn’t be the same without it, and neither would fashion journalist Anna Murphy’s. She shares why it’s so special to her.
It can be easy for us to lose our connection with the seasons these days, busy as we are with families and jobs and all the other things we try to fit in in-between. That’s especially the case for those of us who live in a city. Urbanites, like me, spend much of our time shuffling between one artificially temperature-controlled space and another. So seasonally maladjusted have our lives become that we can find ourselves freezing in the summer (the curse of air conditioning turned up too high) and too hot in the winter (you know who you are, radiator junkies).
No wonder we have also lost the connection between certain fabrics and certain seasons. Silk in winter? Leather in summer? I wear both. My late grandmother wouldn’t have countenanced either; would be horrified by the degree to which I play fast and loose with what I wear and when.
Yet there’s an exception, a fantastic exception. Linen. It remains entirely season specific. Indeed, I would go as far as to describe it as the personification of summer, so much so that wearing linen can, in and of itself, make you feel summery, can summon up the spirit of the season even when the season itself isn’t playing ball.
Partly that’s down to the quality of the fabric itself: its lightness, its airiness, the way, when you wear white, or cream, linen in particular, it seems almost to emanate sunshine. Yet it’s also to do with memories, I think. For pretty much every one of us, tucked away in the stack of mental postcards of vacations past, there will be a linen dress here, some linen pants there.
When I watched the great Netflix adaptation of David Nicholls’s One Day recently, I was reminded that my St Swithin’s Day date when I was young, year in, year out, was not with a Dexter-Mayhew-equivalent, but with a white linen jacket. I wore it to weddings, to christenings, to countless Mediterranean-adjacent destinations and languid midsummer lunches in someone’s back yard, 20 minutes down the road.
That jacket saw me through all of my twenties and much of my thirties. At the beginning of every summer I would get it out of the drawer under my bed and smile at what the two of us had in store for us in the coming months. We were in it together, “it” being summer, the very best kind of “it”.
I can remember every detail about that jacket. What I can’t remember is what happened to it. I imagine that, after nigh on two decades, I wore it out. But it’s still there hanging in the most important closet of all, the one that’s in our heads: perfectly white and crisp, forever redolent of sunshine and good times.
These days what I love more than anything is a three-piece linen suit, or a waistcoat and pants worn without a jacket and layered over a box-fresh tee, or perhaps nothing at all. I also like to play a game of compare and contrast, pairing that waistcoat – yes, for me, it really is all about the waistcoat right now – with a satin skirt or with denim.
In my head I look like Lauren Bacall. In my head the sun is always shining. As for my body, my skin, next to it the linen feels gauzy and caressing; feels cool yet also, confusingly, has a softness that evokes the golden hour, that most wonderful time in the wonderment that is already the best kind of summer’s day. That is the power, more than that, the magic of linen.
Anna Murphy is Fashion Director of “The Times”. Her new book is “Destination Fabulous: Finding Your Way To The Best You Yet” (£10.99, Mitchell Beazley).
Gifts to welcome them to the world. Outfits for any adventure. Everything for the sweetest dreams.
