Six Summer Outfits, Zero F***s

And six revelations on summer dressing and feeling cool, even when you’re hot🔥.

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The other day I was scheduled to go to an early party. A fancier-than-most-nights-out kind of thing. Half-work, half-fun, which means…well, I had no idea.

There I was staring into the void of my closet when my daughter came in and asked what I was doing. “I’m trying to figure out what to wear tonight,” I told her. “What do you think I should wear?” I asked. At which point, she did not say something adorable or impossibly clever. Instead, she turned around and walked into her room, returning with a giant fluffy unicorn, pulling two tiny baby unicorns out of its zippered belly pouch. She then left them all three on my bed like, “Here you go…here are some unicorns. Figure it out.”🦄

I suppose this could (maybe?) be the spirit of summer dressing—not really knowing where you’re going, what to expect, who you’ll see, or whether or not there will be commercial-grade air conditioning. Maybe like a sparkly, fluffy unicorn, we just kinda have to do our own thing, whip a sparkly, fluffy baby unicorn out of a hat, and figure it out. Which, I’ve learned over many years of trial and error, means not really figuring out anything at all. And, instead, just getting dressed in the moment, for the moment, BY the moment. Another good part is this: Stripping away all the expectations of how to look or feel, especially amid sudden heatwaves or thunderstorms, can be its own kind of frosty panacea. A bit of GOOD madness, the kind that takes the edge off when summer can occasionally be a little too much.

I am most definitely NOT a rule maker. But, I do love a working playbook/handbook for getting things done efficiently. So, here are six non-rules I’ve collected over the seasons of my life about dressing for summertime…and, I guess, LIFE, too: