Summer is officially upon us.
For Londoners, that means sweaty Northern Line carriages, aggressively air-conditioned offices and long afternoons spent gazing out of the window and wishing we were somewhere (anywhere) else.
The urge to kick back at this time of year can be difficult to resist, faced as we are with the tantalising prospect of a hard-earned and long-overdue break.
For busy people – that means you – it’s not so much the idea of visiting a new place that drives this excitement as it is the knowledge of what we’ll be leaving behind.
Routine. Responsibility. The soul-crushing drudgery of the daily commute.
Little wonder that we often refer to holidays as “getaways” or “escapes”. And this spirit of escapism informs the way we dress, too.
There’s a fine line between embodying the bohemian ideal and looking like you slept in your clothes
For a couple of weeks, we shed our corporate attire and let it all hang loose, eschewing restrictive tailoring in favour of a more relaxed style. We imagine ourselves not as fully paid-up members of the rat race, but as artists or wandering vagabonds.
This couldn’t be further from the truth for most of us, of course, but that’s beside the point. Holidays are about getting away from it all.
As you’d expect, there’s no great secret to pulling this look off: it’s mostly a question of context.
There’s a fine line between embodying the bohemian ideal and looking like you slept in your clothes, though, so we’ve taken the liberty of putting together an example of how to get it right, drawing on the summer collections of a few of our favourite brands.
It includes a pair of handcrafted, Croc-like leather slides from Yuketen, a shirt from Camoshita and a pair of patchwork, indigo-dyed jeans from Blue Blue Japan.
We’re calling it ‘neo boho’. Think it’ll catch on?
Get the look at Mr Porter
