Laura Craik on holiday fashion, the heatwave and copycat Melania Trump

Our columnist takes on the latest trends
Laura Craik28 July 2016

It’s fair to say I am a creature of habit. I order the same curry every Saturday night. I nurse the same full-fat latte every morning. When my favourite wine disappeared from Ocado, life basically wasn’t worth living. ‘No longer available,’ said the computer, omitting to add ‘because you’ve been ordering two bottles a week since 2003’.

That I go on holiday every single July is hardly a surprise.

So I don’t understand why the week before departure is spent panic-buying a stack of brightly coloured high street tat. Why did I order an ‘off-shoulder top with smocking detail’? Did I imagine that point in the early Nineties where my chest grew too large to go bra-less? On what planet did I think an orange dress would suit me? Planet Holiday. Have you been? It’s a parallel universe where everyone is tall, young, skinny and flat-chested.

Planet Holiday is where sane women come over all Miley Cyrus, and start painting their nails green, experimenting with crop tops and seriously debating whether they should have a fun pink streak in their hair ‘for lolz’. Why the need for so much colour? A cursory glance across any poolside will reveal that the chicest guests are doing monochrome. En route to Minimali (not a real place), does Phoebe Philo buy a turquoise kaftan embellished with cheap sequins that will shed all over the buffet breakfast bar? No, she does not. She wears a loose, tent-like black dress that looks a bit Cos but isn’t.

If you are currently on Planet Holiday, I have three nuggets of wisdom to impart. 1) In the changing room, never look in the three-way mirror because the back view is too depressing to deal with and it’s not like you ever asked to see what the stupid bikini looked like from behind anyway. 2) You’ll never

go wrong with a metallic sandal. 3) Whatever you end up packing, remember everything feels better after a beer. It may not look better. But you’ll definitely care less.

Dress downer

It takes a lot to kill a Roksanda dress stone dead, so take a bow, Melania Trump. Best filed under ‘Publicity You Didn’t Ask For And Really Wish You’d Never Had’, the white dress she wore to address the Republican Convention was presumably chosen in homage to Michelle Obama and Samantha Cameron, two long-time Roksanda fans whose fashion nous Melania can only dream of — much as her husband dreams of having dark, luxuriant hair like Justin Trudeau, as opposed to a sparse thatch of urine-coloured candyfloss. Melania’s style is as plagiarised as her speech. But then, you’d expect nothing else of a person with the bad judgement to have married Donald Trump.

Urban safari

London is yet to embrace air con with the same gusto as New York, so in a heatwave, it does the next best thing and opens its windows — a desultory response that merely ushers in stale air, unwelcome noise and sights you really wish you hadn’t seen. So far this summer, I’ve seen an old man doing press-ups in his vest, and been assaulted by music so loud I was able to Shazam it from the living room (‘Like Baby’ by Jacquees — an excellent R&B song, so cheers for that, random teenager who wandered down my street clutching a boombox). As anyone raised in buttoned-up suburbia will attest, the unselfconsciousness of the city in summer is a glorious thing. There’s no need to curtain-twitch in London: we’ve all got an Access All Areas pass.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter: @EsMagOfficial

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in