Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. Week in, week out, I am here for you. These are the shoes you should be wearing, this is the colour you must stop wearing, this is why you’re not allowed to carry on wearing that nice comfy dress with the flattering sleeve length, here’s a new completely ludicrous outfit idea which you should start wearing because I SAY SO. It’s exhausting!
And what do I get for my efforts? I walk into a store and find it chock-full of near-carbon-copies of fashion it was chock-full of last summer, and possibly the summer before that, as if my ticker-tape updates were as nothing. Case in point: the boho blouse. The boho blouse is an open-necked summer top, halfway between a blouse and a kaftan. It is fitted at the shoulder, flaring to an A-line hem, with voluminous sleeves. It often has drawstring ties, and smocking or some sort of naive embroidery thing around the neckline. You know the one: you probably bought it four years ago.
The boho blouse is one of those pieces that transcend fashion, like a denim shirt or Converse. It arrived as part of a boho summer look, but when the rest of the trend was consigned to history. Anyone still wearing their tiered paisley maxi skirt? Me neither – the boho blouse stayed around. It is vaguely Ibiza, in the expensive-boutique-hotel-weekend sense. It is an inoffensive, feelgood piece. The wide-open neck makes it summery in the broadest sense; usefully, in terms of the British summer, it does not require the temperature to be much above 18 degrees to work.
And so it is that Zara is full of women wearing boho blouses, queueing up to buy more, very slightly different boho blouses. Which is fine, so long as they plan to wear them as seen on the Chloe catwalk, where chiffon versions of the common-or-garden BB were worn with side-striped tracksuit bottoms. Yacht-life Ibiza on the top half, 90s rave on the bottom half is this season’s update on a summer classic of a decade’s standing. See? I’m wearing it too. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
• Jess wears blouse, £159, velvet-tees.co.uk, trousers, £128, meandem.com and shoes, £125, dunelondon.com. Chair, £378, lauraashley.com
