This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

I won’t bore you by cataloguing the drab banalities of summer. They are only too apparent. As I write, 2024 is an improvement on most by merit of its unseasonal gloom. However, brace yourself, the outfitting looks set to be worse.

Boho’s back, baby, meaning droopy, limp and dismal is the name of the game, plus a side order of damp macramé. As for the irony of free-spirited flower-childness signalled via Gaia-imperilling fast fashion, it ain’t exactly lost.

Frankly, this shit has been rumbling away for a while. Twenty years on, the Noughties has stopped qualifying as “last week” and started officially being categorised as “vintage”. Thus slip dresses, “artisanal” quilted jackets, fringing, dodgy crochet, turd brown, Birkenstocks, straw bags and questionable jewellery have been doing the rounds. Borecore has been huge, and boho is borecore with bangles.

Then, there was that moment back in the spring when the front row at Chloé’s autumn/winter show was filled with A-listers all sporting the same fugly, wooden wedge for Chemena Kamali’s archive-mining debut.

At £925 (chloe.com), said Chloé Maxime Wedge Sandal is an expensive way of breaking your ankle, albeit cheaper than skiing. Foremost amongst this identi-shod posse was Blighty’s own Sienna Miller, queen of the Noughties Glasto-is-giving-me-life guise.

Miller also rocked frothy, blossomy Chloé for May’s Met Gala. This was followed by the launch of her second fashion collection for M&S in June: 33 garments cannily inspired by her own retro rig-outs. On the first day of sale, figures were 127 per cent up on what was doubtless an already ambitious target, given how well Miller had fared for Marks before.

By the end of the month, her vintage-style, mid-blue-wash barrel jeans were sold out in every size and going for double their £49.50 price on eBay.

Still, Miller is staggeringly beautiful and would look incredibly bloody good in anything. Meanwhile, the rest of us could be forgiven for shaking our fists at the heavens and crying: “Haven’t we suffered enough? Why, why?”

Maybe Leandra Medine Cohen (formerly of ManRepeller, now of The Cereal Aisle substack) has a point, maybe boredom — with its accompanying sartorial slumping — has become aspirational, a nostalgia for a prelapsarian state of seasonal indolence. We yearn to bask in meadows lost in “long-form content” (or, as they were wont to be referred to, “novels”) or sprawling supine contemplating our coin-belted navels.

Or some clearly do. Not me, mate. I am actually, literally, technically allergic to boho. Well, alright, raffia. Once, as a graduate student, I laid my face down on a raffia placemat mid-oration for rhetorical purposes for a matter of seconds, only to raise it pockmarked with violently indented boho stigmata. I won my argument, plus a week of antihistamines. Anyhow, let us agree that — Miller apart — the phrase “boho chic” is an oxymoron, used to indicate gap-yah tat incompatible with adult sophistication. The only other distinguished exception is Parisian powerhouse Isabel Marant, currently celebrating her brand’s thirtieth birthday.

However, this is because Marant does urban boho, not some grubby, hippy, fever dream. We’re talking frilly frocks with cowboy boots, edgy jeans, sharp jackets, leather trews and biker jackets — vast shoulders, popped collars and insouciantly shoved-up sleeves.

You may remember our heroine’s Bekett wedge-heeled trainer, which became a bestselling, much-plagiarised global hit after Beyoncé sported a pair for a music vid in 2011. “When I was a kid, I was always putting a piece of cork in my sneakers to look higher,” Marant explained to The Times’ Harriet Walker.

“Because the fashion was for very high heels, but I loved being comfortable.” These too are back. Gen Z New Yorkers are mad for them. Seek out a vintage pair, or consider Marant’s new Balskee incarnation (£495, isabelmarant.com).

Otherwise, the aim should be, where possible, not to look actively unwashed. Think a posher, sexier, cleaner boho — more red-carpet Zoë Kravitz than a grimy-necked Kate Moss.

One might incorporate merely a single element — a vintage YSL belt, say. Or, if you must go large, offset a flaccid ensemble with something structured, neat and simple: the bright white, slim-fit, Me & Em Cotton Crop Tee (£55, meandem.com) I recommended in May’s issue, for example, or a mannish jet jacket.

And do, by all means, don stark, all-white, cotton or linen in sweltering climes (NRBY’s is exquisitely winning). To be sure, it’s a kind of middle-class for Ryan air/Tuscan traveller/Timotei-ad platitude, but none the worse for that. Accessorise with SPF and stain wipes.