Our Hamptons Style Selects
Hamptons dressing gets described as preppy, which is not quite right. It is closer to a set of constraints: natural fibres, a short colour list, and nothing that looks like it needed effort. Linen, cotton poplin, stripe, gingham, white, navy and a lot of sand. The reason it works in photographs and in real life is that the palette is so narrow that everything matches by accident, and the fabrics look better slightly crumpled than they do pressed. The failure mode is dressing like a catalogue, with the matching set, the matching bag and the matching sandal all bought on the same afternoon. Below, twenty four pieces sorted by price, from a seventy dollar smocked cami to a poplin skort, and a note on which of the matching sets in here are actually worth taking as a pair.
