Your Hot Weather Survival Hack: Clothes That Don’t Touch Your Body

When you’re in the throes of a heat wave, there are a few options for staying comfortable: 1. Nudity. 2. Spending the day in close proximity to a body of water as long as that water source is also shade-adjacent. 3. Staying inside and basking in the breeze of a fan. All of these options sound just dandy, but unfortunately, they aren't always feasible. Obligation demands that we put on clothes and leave the house to go about our sweaty lives — a normally harmless pursuit that, when the mercury breaks the 30-degree mark, leaves us rumpled, drenched and in search of a little dignity (and a lot of natural deodorant).

We have one form of recourse, however, when the mercury is at such heights that walking outside feels like wearing a hot air blanket: clothes that barely touch your body. Whether it’s an ankle-length tent dress cut so generously that your body type is anyone’s guess, or a pair of trousers so palazzo-ed that you could surreptitiously do the Charleston, this summer dressing hack is all about finding the widest of the wide and the loosest of the loose, to keep as much air circulating beneath your duds as decency will allow and keeping skin-cloth contact to an absolute minimum.