AS IT Was

FROM MOSCHINO’S POOL INFLATABLES TO COACH’S JELLY SHOES AND SAND-COVERED CATWALKS, FASHION IS BASKING IN NOSTALGIA FOR SUMMER HOLIDAYS OF YESTERYEAR

- LAURA ANTONIA JORDAN

At the beginning of the renowned travel writer Sara Wheeler’s brilliant new memoir Glowing Still, she unearths the notebooks in which she has recorded her far-flung trips over the years. The diaries are battered, with destinations scrawled on the spines (China, Serbia, Fiji, Norway). She writes: ‘Sensations rose like milk to the boil when I re-read the tattered notebooks, and I found it tender to be in the company of my younger self.’

I experienced a similar feeling on a recent visit to my storage unit in highly unexotic Hoxton, in east London. Looking for a coat that I could not find (inevitably, I am sure, at the bottom and in the back, such are the rules of Sod’s Law), I ended up rummaging through boxes where it definitely would not be. Why? Because ‘SUMMER’ was scrawled across them in Sharpie, sometimes followed by a smiley little sun in case I missed the memo.

The contents of those boxes were mixed: some things had cost more than business-class flights and others had been cheaper than a drink; some were sturdy and sensible and others, well, not. All of them, however, were as battered as Wheeler’s notebooks and, like them, told their own (albeit more sedate) stories of travel. There was the Theyskens’ Theory dress bedecked in sequins – some of them now missing – worn under shooting stars in the Joshua Tree desert. There were the embroidered smocks, blouses and dresses picked up in Mexico, Morocco and India, crinkled from being stuffed into a cloth tote from Hotel Il Pellicano. There were big hats and bigger sunglasses and a huge Gucci silk scarf that had been worn around my hair or waist, now dried stiff with the salt of seawater.