professorpski:

It’s Too Darned Hot: How To Dress for the Heat

I once had a student working for me in the summer who complained she thought wearing a dress would be cooler but she was still too darned hot. The dress was actually the problem: it was denim and skin-tight.

So, first, opt for looser cuts. Loose means airflow, or the chimney effect–hot air rises–as the Dress Doctors called it. Loose means any little breeze on a sultry day will flow through your clothes and cool you off. So a dress or skirt with some flare, trousers with some width, these are best options. As you can see from my photo, a blouse that can be worn outside a skirt instead of tucked in, also allows air to flow. 

Fabric? Opt for lightweight wovens. Wovens are cooler than knits, ounce for ounce, so forget leggings for now. I even give up on knit tops when it’s this warm. The coolest fabrics are rayon, silk, cotton and linen. And I find if you have a fabric that blends linen or cotton with silk, you get a bit less wrinkling. Rayon if very light weight will wrinkle when you sit on it etc., but
much less so

if it is a better quality with a bit more weight to it. Or, you can opt for seersucker, gauze and others fabrics which have crinkles built into them and forget about wrinkles entirely. Of course, blending natural fibers with some synthetic fiber will eliminate wrinkling too, but makes for a hotter fabric. The exception are sheer synthetics which I find are ok for summer wear if lined with a Bemberg rayon lining. In fact, I once had a colleague who claimed a pair of silk slacks were her hottest clothing to wear when really it was the polyester lining which was the problem. I have been known to cut out polyester linings from summer ready-to-wear and replace them with rayon.

Color? Black definitely heats up more in the sun as you know if you have a black car interior, so why not give it up for the summer? Navy can look serious if that’s your aim, and so can various shades of beige. And if you don’t have to look serious, indulge in the pastels, and the tropicals, or some of these cross-weaves that have white threads going in one direction and a darker shade going in the other direction as you see in the skirt above which combines white and red linen threads. If you go simply white, remember that a textured woven–eyelet, embroidery-pique, etc.–is less likely to show the inevitably smudges of dust or dirt.

Of course, a tall glass with a lot of ice cubes helps too.