Current mood: older, wiser, skimpier?

I could tell you that my style muse for this summer is Georgia O’Keefe in her black and white layers and wide brimmed hats. I could wax lyrical about the literary allusions that are woven throughout the next season collections. I could tell you that now is the time to try challenging clothes that demand a certain cerebral disposition to pull off. But that would all be lies.

Rather this summer, I want to look obviously, inanely hot. When it comes to the question of what to wear, my head has been turned by Gemma Owen, the 19-year-old dressage rider daughter of Michael Owen. I am taking notes from 23-year-old waitress Indiyah Polack. I am looking to a 23-year-old dancer from Thirsk, Tasha Ghouri, for inspiration. That’s right, the ladies of Love Island have disrupted my style sensibility.

If in the past we have consumed Love Island clothes with a morbid fascination (‘under boob’ anyone?), this year’s eBay partnership makes it all feel more legit. A surprisingly pleasure, perhaps, but not a guilt-riddled one. Still, there’s no denying that I am perhaps too old to wear plunging shirts and micro skirts and bikinis that are almost entirely guzzled up by the buttocks. If 27-year-old Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu is positioning herself as a kind of Mrs. Robinson figure, then I guess, with a decade on her, I am almost dead.

Well, not so fast. After years of agonising over my body and waiting for the ‘right’ one to appear (truly, a futile, never-ending pursuit) I have made summer 2022 my time to enjoy my body in the teeniest, weeniest clothes that I can A) find and that B) won’t get me arrested.

Drawing on a confidence that develops because of, not in spite of, age my moment of emboldening came in Ibiza a couple of weeks ago when I wore a tight checkerboard mini dress from Nanushka. I tried it over trousers, under a jacket, and in the end I scrapped both and just went for it (very Love Island) – with Birkenstocks (very not Love Island). Blame it on sitting out two years worth of summer and parties, blame it on the spray tan, whatever it was: I was into it. It was hardly an act of bravery that will be immortalised in the history books, but in the context of my own little life story it was actually Quite A Big Deal.

Laura

Image: Love Island ITV