I have lived in England long enough to understand that the relationship with the seasons here is deeply personal.
Almost intimate.
The calendar offers spring, summer, autumn and winter. British wardrobes, however, often seem to recognise two: winter and summer. On particularly creative days, both are worn at once.
Individual freedom is sacred.
Fortunately, so is my perplexity.
Oxford Street. December.
Coat.
Shorts.
Flip-flops.
Separately, nothing to object to. Together, they look like three people who received invitations to different holidays and accidentally ended up in the same body.
The coat says December. The shorts say July. The flip-flops have already ordered a Spritz in Mykonos.
I don't judge.
I'm confused.
Then there are those days when it is four degrees outside, with a crosswind and that peculiar English drizzle that cannot even summon the dignity to become proper rain.
And past you walks a young woman wearing an amount of fabric that in Capri might be considered optimistic even in August.
Of course she can wear whatever she likes.
Skin does not scandalise me.
The meteorology confuses me.
For a few seconds I look at her, then the sky, then my coat. Inevitably I wonder: have I misunderstood something?
Then summer arrives and you finally think the problem has solved itself.
Thirty-five degrees. Sun. Tarmac contemplating its own liquidation.
And along comes someone in a padded windbreaker.
At that point I no longer judge.
I become concerned.
I know perfectly well that temperature is personal. Some people reach for a cardigan at twenty degrees; others open the windows at ten.
But at thirty-five degrees, confronted by a padded jacket, my open-mindedness begins to melt with the pavement.
The remarkable thing is that, on the same afternoon, you can meet a woman practically dressed for the beach and, fifty metres later, a man equipped to cross the North Sea.
They are probably both perfectly comfortable.
It is I, standing between them, who no longer knows what season it is.
And this is where my Small Codes come in.
I have no desire to tell you what to wear, how much to cover, how much to spend or at what temperature an ankle may legally be exposed. How exhausting.
Contemporary good manners, to me, are much simpler: notice where you are.
Context is not a rule.
It is information.
You may ignore it. Preferably with intent.
Being chic is not about being perfect. It means that what you are wearing, what you are doing and the place you are in appear to have had at least a brief conversation before you arrived.
I adore mix & match.
Mix & panic confuses me.
But I don't judge.
Naturally.
Andrea Morel