Fashion: Summertime and the dressing is easy: Forget the fashion police, you're on holiday. And that means cheesecloth and muslin, says Alison Veness

You are dreaming. You are swinging down the street in killer five-inch heels, your mouth a mess of red lipstick, your hair teased to spun sugar, your body a snaky S-bend. Perhaps it's not a dream . . . it's a nightmare.

For those who cannot yet face the high glamour that fashion is forcefully promoting, for those who steer clear of Wonderbras, girdles and other fiercesome underpinning, here are some simple, uncomplicated clothes in which to slop around in defiance of fashion dictat. Here are holiday clothes whose only aim is effortlessness.

The materials - cloudy cheesecloths and textured muslins - trade on their natural qualities rather than any man-made artifice (all that is to come, for 'synthetic' is autumn's buzz word). But in the dog days of summer, all you want is fine fabrics and easy clothes; a teeny A-line tunic, an ankle-skimming Empire-line dress, gathered and smocked; a boyish skinny shirt in the cool bleached undertones of pale china clay.

Designers may have decreed that pneumatic breasts, tiny waists and curvy hips are the Next Big Thing, but for the time being, the last Next Big Thing, the waif look, is revealing its positive side in the luxury of studied dressing down.

For now, grace and freedom can still be found in clothes that are gentle and minimal. Although they are sheer (and for a summer holiday, why not?), they are far from aggressive or volatile.

(Photograph omitted)