September is fashion’s biggest month — the one when the glossies land with a thump, fat with the season’s marching orders. This autumn, apparently, we are all to be swathed in leopard-print coats. A delicious idea, unless you live somewhere the weather app still insists it ‘feels like’ 55°C. In Dubai, our September issue is a more prosaic one: how to be covered, cool, and presentable at the school gate before the bell. And the answer, mercifully, is shorter than usual.
Because there’s an equation every Dubai parent solves before coffee: covered enough for the car park, cool enough for a heat that hasn’t read the fashion calendar, polished enough for the class rep — all before the receptionist makes you sign the late register. With the humidity at a swampy 60 per cent, it’s the hardest sum of the academic year.
Every variable fights the others. Cover up for the gate and you drip; dress for the heat and you’re underdressed for a culture that, quite reasonably, asks for covered shoulders and knees. Reach for linen and you’re a crumpled, sweat-mapped mess by the brutal afternoon pick-up. There is no outfit harder to get right than the one nobody is supposed to notice: the school run.
So this term, I’m taking my cue from the under-11s. My middle son is starting Year 7, incandescent about the move from shorts to long trousers. While he mourns his last summer of bare knees, I’m making the elongated schoolboy short my whole personality. Parents, mercifully, have no uniform list (though given some of the WhatsApp threads, perhaps we should). The knee-length Bermuda short is the smartest answer to a September car park: long enough to keep the peace, cooler than any trouser and — cut correctly — stylish rather than skater.
(Fashion) history book at the ready: the Bermuda short began as hot-climate uniform — British officers and businessmen on the subtropical island wrote knee-length tailoring into the dress code to look respectable in punishing heat. Which makes it a uniform twice over — born of one dress code a century ago, and now getting me through another at the school gate.
Proportion is everything. Get a Bermuda wrong and you’re back in ‘she’ll grow into it’ PE territory; get it right and it reads deliberate and expensive. What you’re avoiding, at all costs, is a polyester number that looks like you raided the Threads uniform aisle.
The fashion set has done the homework. Margot Robbie, patron saint of the autumn 2026 Bermuda, wears Beare Park’s ‘Carmen’ in silk dupion — though silk, like Reformation’s lace-trimmed ‘Clara’, is best saved for later in term, once the humidity dips. For now, go woven and matte: Anine Bing’s viscose ‘Bryson’, or The Frankie Shop’s ‘Marfa’ in stretch cotton, while The Row challenger Wardrobe.NYC, fresh from its H&M collaboration, keeps an excellent Bermuda in its own line. Worn with a longline shirt, nobody’s kicking off on the class WA group.
Which leaves the feet. A Bermuda bares the ankle, so the eye travels straight down — and in this climate, footwear is where good intentions go to die. September swelling is inevitable: puffy feet in heels mean blisters, and sandy carparks destroy white trainers. So this term needs a third shoe — an elegant, closed-enough flat that survives a sandstorm but still works for coffee at Koncrete. I’ve resisted mesh flats until now, but with the ‘feels like’ temperature still brutal, they’re the only humane way to do a closed toe. Alaïa’s fishnet ballet flat is the A* option; go gold to Dubai-it.
Drop-off is a fashion show. Pick-up is a survival exercise. Get the formula right now and the whole term flows. Get it wrong, and you’ll be re-sitting it, bleary-eyed, every morning until June. Class dismissed.
Source: Khaleej Times