Summer Fashion

Summer fashion is dressing for the hottest of the four temperate seasons — the season of pool parties, beach trips and backyard barbecues, falling after spring and before autumn. Fashion week events often showcase spring and summer fashion together as a Spring/Summer Collection. The hot categories are shorts, swimwear, swim shirts, sun hats, sandals, flip flops, summer dresses, resort wear, cruise wear, sunglasses, t-shirts and beachwear. Summer fashion is about making outfits effortless, breezy and carefree: stay cool as well as trendy, and build the season's biggest trends into the next trip out of the house.

Summer is typically hot, depending on where you live obviously. It's the season of pool parties, beach trips, and backyard barbecues.

Fashion week events often showcase spring & summer fashion together as a Spring / Summer Collection.

Hot categories include shorts, flip-flops, t-shirts, and most certainly swimwear.

Stay chic in the heat with trendy summer fashion styles:

What is summer & when is it?

At or around the summer solstice, the earliest sunrise and latest sunset occurs, the days are longest and the nights are shortest, with day length decreasing as the season progresses after the solstice. The date of the beginning of summer varies according to climate, tradition, and culture. Summer is the hottest of the four temperate seasons, falling after spring and before autumn. When it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.

If you live in Antarctica, Kaktovic, Heiss Island or North Greenland you may want to investigate different summer fashion options.

Make sure to incorporate summer's biggest trends the next time you leave your house. During the summer months, stay cool as well as trendy. Summer fashion is about making your outfits effortless as well as breezy & care free.

Learn more about spring fashion here in our terminology section.

Effortless Is the Brief

Every fashion season has a technical problem to solve, and summer's is heat. The category list reads as a set of answers: swimwear and swim shirts for the water, sun hats and sunglasses for glare, sandals and flip flops for hot ground, shorts and summer dresses for airflow, and t-shirts as the default top. Resort wear and cruise wear extend the same wardrobe to vacations, where the summer conditions are the destination rather than the local weather. The style direction follows the function — summer fashion aims at outfits that look effortless because, in hot weather, effort itself reads as discomfort.

One Half of the Fashion Year

Summer rarely stands alone in the industry's calendar. It is designed and shown with spring, sold through the warm months, and cleared as fall arrives — the mirror image of the spring fashion page's September problem, since summer clothes are on the rack while the next cold-weather collections are already being shown. For shoppers in genuinely cold places — the page jokes about Antarctica, Kaktovic, Heiss Island and North Greenland — summer fashion is a travel wardrobe rather than a local season, which is exactly the market resort and cruise collections serve.

Common Questions

What are the core summer fashion categories?

Shorts, swimwear, swim shirts, sun hats, sandals, flip flops, summer dresses, resort wear, cruise wear, sunglasses, t-shirts and beachwear — light, cool clothing for the year's hottest season.

Why are spring and summer fashion shown together?

Fashion week events often showcase spring and summer fashion together as a Spring/Summer Collection: one combined warm-weather season of product, designed, bought and sold as a unit opposite the Fall/Winter collection.

When does summer begin?

At or around the summer solstice the earliest sunrise and latest sunset occur, days are longest and nights shortest, with day length decreasing as the season progresses. The exact beginning of summer varies by climate, tradition and culture — and when it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it is winter in the Southern Hemisphere.