The problem with a white dress is that a white dress is never just that. It is a White Dress, with all the baggage that entails: weddings, Miss Havisham, church, purity. Fussy seat-cleanliness checks and the need to tailor menu choices around splashability. The simplicity is only skin deep, you see. What should be the most no-brainer summer dress of all is actually the most complex.
I’ve got a white lace summer party dress. I’ve worn it once, to the ballet. Every other time I’ve tried it on, I’ve looked in the mirror, felt as if I was trying to look like Pippa Middleton in the royal box at Wimbledon, and taken it off again, usually to wear something colourful. Colour is straightforwardly jolly; white is tainted by the air of being neurotic and/or attention-seeking.
But I have high hopes that this summer my white dress will get some outings. Primarily because there are a lot of white dresses around, which makes for safety in numbers. You can’t look attention-seeking if you are wearing more or less the same thing as three other women in the room. Plus those other women will be in the same boat in the seat-cleanliness stakes, so at a picnic there will always be someone else to talk to standing up because she can’t sit down.
There are essentially three white dresses. There’s the bohemian-floaty one, which is what I am wearing here. This is comfortable and pleasingly informal; heels and/or lipstick may be necessary to add snap. There’s the demure, structured, formal one: great for summer power dressing in the evening or at work, although it can look a bit second-wedding dress. Then there’s the Riviera-bombshell one, waisted, in crisp cotton, the gold standard, but the toughest to pull off. (When a dress calls to mind Bardot and Monroe, the bar is high.)
The perennial etiquette issue with a white summer dress is: can you wear it as a wedding guest? Of course you can, if you are swear-on-your-life certain the bride won’t be even secretly, minutely miffed. If there is the remotest possibility she might be, then it’s a straight no. For once, the white dress rule is simple.
• Jess wears dress, £79.99, and heels, £59.99, both zara.com.
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Fashion assistant: Hannah Davidson. Hair and makeup: Sharon Ive at Carol Hayes Management.
