It’s hard to look sophisticated in summer. This seems ridiculous, in a country where summer isn’t even actually hot very often. Nonetheless, fact. Case in point: a T-shirt. It is tricky to make a T-shirt look more than basic. The woman in my mind’s eye, as I put on a T-shirt on a summer day, is Jane Birkin. Maybe she’s wearing the T-shirt with plimsolls and a little skirt. She’s got a newspaper in her straw basket as she takes a stroll for a cafe creme. But in reality, if I put on a T-shirt, I look as if I’ve been sent into the garden to play.
A polo neck might seem a drastic solution to this conundrum, and clearly isn’t going to be your first port of call in a heatwave. Being red-faced and sweaty, tugging at the neckline of your sweater like a frantic dog on a lead, is hardly going to help us reach that elusive state of sun-dappled grace. But there will be many summer days when a high neck and bare arms are as appropriate a reaction to the weather forecast as a cotton shirt.
It is hard to overstate the usefulness of the polo neck in the fashion lexicon of 2017. The brilliance of it is that it is both Very Fashion, and Above Fashion. It has dominated the catwalk silhouette for two years solid, which makes it very fashion, but there remains something intransigently puritan about it. You get to be on-trend while looking as if you are much too high-minded for such nonsense. The ideal situation.
Not to mention the power of a bare arm. The friction between pop culture in thrall to sex and a global fashion marketplace in which modesty is an ever more powerful commercial force has made necklines and hemlines loaded with meaning. In the world of the Daily Mail Legs-It front page, arms are the only part of a woman’s body that are allowed to be seen naked without innuendo.
A bare arm is athletic, healthy, dynamic. It is the positive humanity of Michelle Obama. And with a polo neck, you won’t even feel a chill. Warm feelings all round.
• Jess wears tunic, £280, by Equipment, and trousers, £225, by APC, both from net-a-porter.com. Sandals, £24.99, hm.com. Chair, £650, grahamandgreen.co.uk
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Sam Cooper at Carol Hayes Management.
