THE LAST DAYS OF SUMMER
An ode to the final light of the season.
Roxanne Mckee x Hector Mclean
There is a moment towards the end of summer when the season seems to become more beautiful precisely because we know it cannot last. The light falls differently. The evenings arrive almost imperceptibly earlier. Fields that were brilliant green in June have faded to straw and gold, gardens have grown a little unruly, and the air carries the first suggestion that something is about to change.
These are the last days of summer.
They rarely announce themselves. There is no date in the calendar marking the final evening when it will still be light after dinner, or the last morning we will leave the house without thinking about a coat. Instead, summer disappears gradually, in increments so small that we notice them only afterwards. A cardigan is taken out one evening. The windows are closed before bed. Shadows grow longer. Then one morning there is a chill in the air and the season has quietly moved on without us.
Perhaps that is why these weeks possess such a particular romance. High summer can feel endless. By August, we know better.
Roxanne Mckee x Hector Mclean
There is something wonderfully languid about the way we dress at this time of year, too. The rules become less certain. Bare shoulders meet long skirts; silk dresses are worn beneath coats; tailoring returns, but without the heaviness of winter. Linen is not quite ready to be put away, while wool still feels premature. We begin to layer almost accidentally.
It is arguably the most interesting moment in the wardrobe.
For months, summer dressing has been concerned with simplicity: the dress, the shirt, the sandal, the fewest possible layers between ourselves and the heat. But as the temperature begins its slow descent, clothes regain their possibilities. Texture returns. Trousers become longer. Jackets reappear over dresses. Colours seem to soften with the landscape — tobacco, cream, faded green, stone, ochre and the particular washed-out blue of a late-summer sky.
There is no need to rush towards autumn.
Fashion has always encouraged us to live slightly ahead of ourselves. Winter coats appear while we are still eating outside; spring collections arrive when the pavements are covered in January rain. We are forever being ushered towards the next thing. But there is something rather lovely about refusing.
Roxanne Mckee x Hector Mclean
Keep the summer dress out a little longer. Wear it with a jacket when the evening cools. Take the long way home while there is still light. Sit outside even if it requires a blanket. Order another bottle for the table. There will be plenty of time for autumn.
Perhaps the best clothes for this moment are those that seem to belong to no particular season at all. A beautifully cut pair of trousers. A silk shirt. A long dress with enough weight to move in the wind. An old jacket softened by years of wear. Pieces made from natural fabrics that crease, fade and acquire character rather than demanding to remain immaculate.
They are clothes designed to be lived in rather than simply photographed.
And there is something about late summer that makes us want to live a little more deliberately. Holidays are ending. Schools reopen. Diaries begin to fill. The peculiar suspension of July and August gives way to routine. September has always carried the feeling of a second January: new notebooks, new intentions, the quiet sense that life is beginning again.
Before it does, there are these few weeks in between.
They deserve our attention.
Drive somewhere without much of a plan. Swim when the water is probably a little too cold. Eat peaches over the sink. Take photographs you won't see until the film comes back. Wear the dress that feels slightly too extravagant for an ordinary afternoon. Stay outside until you realise everyone else has gone home.
There is an elegance in treating ordinary life as though it were worthy of occasion.
Perhaps that is what we miss when we talk about summers from the past. It isn't necessarily the place, the weather or even the people we remember. It is the feeling of having time. Long afternoons in which nothing particularly remarkable happened and which, years later, somehow become the days we would most like to return to.
Roxanne Mckee x Hector Mclean
A photograph has an extraordinary ability to preserve that feeling. Not simply how somebody looked, but the temperature of an afternoon; the movement of grass in the wind; the colour of the sky just before evening. It turns an otherwise unremarkable moment into evidence that it happened.
And perhaps that is why the end of summer has always belonged so naturally to photography. We know, instinctively, that we are losing something. So we point a camera towards it.
Soon the fields will darken. Coats will replace dresses, evenings will retreat indoors and the first fire will be lit. We will welcome all of it. Autumn has pleasures entirely of its own.
But not yet.
Roxanne Mckee x Hector Mclean
For now, there is still warmth in the sun. There are still evenings to waste and beautiful clothes to wear for no particular reason. There is still light enough to stay out a little longer.
Summer has not gone.
And sometimes the loveliest part of something is the moment just before it does.