Holiday fashion must-packs for Spring/Summer 2020

CAPRI PANTS: Created by fashion designer Sonja de Lennart in 1948, popularised by English couturier Bunny Roger, name of course comes from the Italian isle of Capri, where they became popular in the late 1950s. They became part of Audrey Hepburn’s signature style after she wore them in Roman Holiday and Grace Kelly posed in a pair at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955. Matchy-matchy is a must for SS20, and makes a lot of sense for versatile holiday packing. Pink linen top, £55, and trousers, £55, by Betty Barclay.

Travel broadens the mind but shrinks the wardrobe to a capsule collection of carefully chosen mix-and-match classics (if you do it properly, that is). First, the history bit. It was the arrival of the railways in the mid 19th century that saw the creation of the first European holiday resorts. Until that time, the South of France and other Mediterranean hot-spots were favoured largely by English aristocrats who went for health reasons and only in winter. La Belle Époque (dating from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) brought wealthy folk from the UK and Europe, and Queen Victoria spent her last winter break in 1899 in Nice.

In 1923, an American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy, lived in Antibes, and threw lavish parties for friends including Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, and F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, reinventing the South of France as a summer holiday destination. They are also credited with conjuring the word “sunbathing” and there are those who argue that he was the first to wear that staple of classic resort wear, the striped Breton top.

Possibly, but it was Coco Chanel in the 1920s and ‘30s who popularised many beach and holiday pieces we still wear today.

Here are must-have new classics that every well-dressed traveller in 2020 must have.