FASHION / No Flowers, Please

WALKING around the city this summer, there are girls in flowery dresses everywhere. Long printed cotton dresses with buttons up the front, dresses with little girly sprigs, and floaty chiffon dresses covered in swathes of pastel roses. And if you're older than a teenager - or maybe even if you are still a teenager - you might start feeling rather tired of all those sweet frocks, and you might want to look a bit less flowery, a bit more sophisticated. The model in these pictures is very young, but the Agnes B linen dress she is wearing in the main photograph would look perfectly acceptable on an older woman, as would the white Rifat Ozbek shirt (though perhaps not unbuttoned at the midriff). Okay, so an older woman might not feel as comfortable as the model in a white maxi A-line skirt and a pair of raffia wedges. But she might like the look and the feel of the fabric - unbleached linen, simple, natural, elegantly neutral. It makes a change from all those flowers.

(Photographs omitted)