Two Ways to Wear White in Summer

I love wearing white in summer. I like lace blouses with denim bottoms, white dresses, white jeans and chinos and the list goes on! So today I am going to feature some great ideas for summer outfits featuring white. By white I mean stark optic white (like photocopier paper), as well as ivory, off white, winter white etc all the way to oyster, champagne and pale beige. Anything that is your palest neutral counts. The different whites suit people with different colourings.

White dress, shoes and bag.

This makes getting dressed in the morning beautifully simple. I find the
difficulty with this outfit is in finding the dress! So if you are interested and don’t have a white dress in your closet then keep your eyes open when in shops. If you go an all white (rather than a print or something with a placement pattern) it is very striking but you are going to need to pay attention to the fit when you try it on and make sure you like it as there are very few styling tricks you can use to play with the
way the dress looks (if you are planning to wear it alone, without jacket or cardigan).

In this outfit I liked the movement that the micro pleats bring. The dress is also lined, which saves wearing a petticoat, which could have been hard to match to the dress’ spaghetti straps. I like the waist definition, I think, although it is very fluid, there is no visible shaping of the dress itself, you are relying on the self fabric belt to
cinch it which sometimes looks like you have tied a ribbon around a pillow. I imagine that the dress could be worn without the waist tie and look nice and breezy and effortless. You could also add a wider belt in a different fabric, such as a leather belt that you wrap around a few times and tie, or a corset type belt with a buckle at the front and some elastic at the back for comfort and movement, but also great waist definition. They have chosen to style the model in heels, which gives a longer leg
line and is elegant, but not necessary.

Other shoes they could have used are nice dressy sneakers, such as these. The white is low contrast and therefore elongates the look, rather than drawing the eye to the sneaker and keeping it there. It is also low ccontrast with the model’s skin tone which always elongates the visual line of the leg. She could also have worn backless loafers, perforated brogues, wedges, espadrilles, birkenstocks or a wide variety of other flat to mid heeled sandal. I personally prefer a dress with sleeves.

White pants and top

Here is a very clean and simple all white outfit. Many people have already got white tops and bottoms in their wardrobe, and could create this outfit without much effort. I wear a look like this with white high waisted straight legged jeans, white skinny jeans, white baggy cuffed chinos and in the past white three quarter length pants. I don’t tend to wear it with as tight a top as the one shown on the model here, because I prefer a fluid fit when I tuck a top in. I wear a billowy crepe top, tucked in, as well as a long line (knee length) button up shirt left out (over the skinny jeans), and a couple of different ruffly lacy shirts and blouses. I tuck the longer ones and one of them sits at hip length and I don’t tuck it.

In this outfit they have gone very high contrast with both shoes and bag. Any
white shoes or lower contrast skin toned would also provide a flattering low contrast line, or for a fun colour pop a bright colour such as red or blue could be worn. If you were going to do this it might be nice to pull the different colours together by wearing a scarf featuring the white and the colour. You could even just wear it tied as a wrist cuff if you did not want anything around your neck and it would provide visual cohesion.