Low-Maintenance Summer Style

My style takeaways from two months in Spain

Hi Friends,

As I slowly unpack my bags, it becomes clear that I needed very little to be away for two months.

With no office to go to or professional obligations other than writing, What Looks Good, I was able to adopt the laid-back Spanish lifestyle. In clothes and attitude.

Every morning, I woke up naturally at sunrise, which was around 6:30. I got up, put water on for tea, and photographed the sunrise. Here are a few stunners.

Left Jávea, right Dénia

We split our time between two houses. The first month was in Jávea. At the end of May, we move to Dénia, a port city just north of Jávea. The Dénia house was perched on the slopes of Montgó, accessible only by steep, narrow, blind, curved roads. In Jávea, I admired the mountain from afar; in Dénia, it loomed overhead with the Mediterranean sprawled before us.

Montgó, as seen from Playa del Arenal and Cap Negre, near our first house.

Montgó as seen from the patio of the second house. At left, the full moon rises behind the mountain.

Once in Dénia, it was as though a switch was flipped and summer kicked in. I went from wearing cashmere sweaters and pants to caftans, dresses, and loose linen clothes. Summer arrived, and I was ready to embrace it. But this is not about what I wore (I think you may have had enough of that), it’s about what I learned about style in Spain and how easy dressing had become with my limited choices. Comfort, freedom of movement, and dressing for the heat were the deciding factors. Both houses were without a full-length mirror, something I thought I couldn’t live without. I dressed by intuition and mood, in a way that was freeing.

In the US, fashion is covered extensively, though primarily it’s celebrity-centered. Red carpet photos, emerging from SUV shots, paparazzi stalking celebrities walking the streets of the city with said shots endlessly parsed online, piece by piece, what shoes, bag, clothes they were wearing, and where you can get them. Fly-by-night trends hawked to the hills until it’s oversaturated and deemed finished to make way for the next big thing. This is the cycle fashion now runs on. It has little to do with style and everything to do with selling more product.

Just look at the commodification of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Or the endless coverage of the Kardashians, still, after all these years. Yet, I don’t see a trickle-down effect of good style. We’ve lost the inspiration source of great fashion editorials that could hit you hard somewhere deep inside, allowing you to dream, planting the seeds for personal style. It was not about copying; it was about cultivating.

There is also the shaming aspect of fashion now. We’ve been subtly bullied into