Scorchio! The Summer Style Police are Coming for You

Sexist attitudes are very much alive and kicking in the suburbs

Photo by Nadiia Ploshchenko 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Gordon Bennett, it’s hot as balls, isn’t it? This week, like anyone residing on the British Isles, I’ve been basking in the non-stop sunshine. It was 27°C in Inverness for crying out loud! Inverness! The weather across the 6,000 islands which make up my homeland is much maligned, and for good reason. It can be, as is well publicised, unrelentingly bleak. When the nights draw in and the spiritless pewter days seep seamlessly into each other, you really do have to dig deep to find your sunshine. A wet, dark, cool summer is deadly, because you already know what lies ahead. One friend in from LA once told me that she just didn’t have London in her and still, to this day, believes I’m hard as nails simply by dint of my address. Doubtless, I’ve raised my kids to be impervious to the elements-they already know winter is coming.

One thing’s for sure: we really need our summers in London and thankfully, 2025’s edition is set to go down in the annals as a corker. Even if every weekend after today is a washout, we’ve had our fair share. The city, however, is not built to cope with intemperately warm temperatures and arguably neither are its inhabitants. Heatwaves can inspire almost carnival-esque behaviour, even on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s pretty obvious that no-one knows quite how to dress. You’re just as likely to spot a sweat stained three piece suit as you are a bikini as you go about your day in W1; that easy-breezy high summer nonchalance just aint a part of the British style vocabulary.

That’s probably the reason I transport myself mentally to Rome when I’m dressing for a blistering day. I love a co-ord, shorts and mini dresses and will happily waft through the district line in a slightly sheer cotton or linen look. It’s summer, sue me. I understand that for many women this amount of flesh on show can feel nerve-racking lest they attract unwanted male attention and that has of course, happened to me in the past. But mostly, I find that the unwanted attention I draw comes from other women. This week, I was caught off guard on the tube at my local zone 3 station by a barbed aside. The mudslinger was around my age, and she smugly (and loudly) counselled a male colleague about what I was wearing: ‘fine for the beach, but not for the tube’. She actually pointed, much to the amused glances of other bystanders.