In Dubai, we don’t dress for the weather. We dress for the air conditioning. Ours is a wardrobe engineered for a 22°C dining room, for valet parking and marble lobbies, for the 11 metres between a car door and a hostess stand. It is a magnificent wardrobe. It is also, as I have learned the hard way, one that can look faintly unhinged on a damp Tuesday in Marylebone.
The Dubai aesthetic does not travel — not because it is wrong, but because it is louder than its surroundings. What reads as polished on Al Wasl Road reads as a lot on a cobbled street in Brera. Every July, thousands of us fly out of DXB immaculately dressed for the city we have just left.
Our mothers’ generation flew to London to shop. I fly to London to buy what Dubai never sold me in the first place. This is luxury’s great inversion: there is no longer any earthly reason to buy new clothes in Europe. The drops are simultaneous — the Burberry x Hunza G capsule reached us the same week it reached Chelsea. The UAE is a priority market now, not an afterthought. And with the euro where it is, the arbitrage our mothers chased has quietly evaporated. And since Britain scrapped tax-free shopping for overseas visitors in 2021, London doesn’t even offer a VAT refund anymore. The city that once rewarded the trip now charges you full price, like a local.
So, my rule for summer 2026: buy the new before you fly. Buy the old when you land.
The new comes down to three purchases. A swimsuit that refuses to behave like one: the Burberry x Hunza G ‘Faye’ puts in a full day’s work as a bodysuit under linen tailoring the moment you leave the beach. (It’s still available here via Ounass in colourways sold out in Europe, so get-it-before-you-go.) A considered flat, because nothing tones down an over-eager Dubai dress like shoe with nothing to prove but its packability — Le Monde Béryl’s ‘Luna’ slipper, the label’s 2016 original, modelled on the friulane worn by Venetian gondoliers and hand-finished in Italy. A shoe, in other words, born on European cobbles. And a bag that says absolutely nothing. In Dubai, the handbag is the flex. In Europe, the handbag is the tell. Loro Piana’s ‘Extra Pocket L19’ is soft enough to squash into a carry-on, doubles as a crossbody the moment you land, and announces precisely nothing. It is the sartorial equivalent of lowering your voice.
Then, having landed, go hunting. Europe’s remaining advantage is not newness but provenance: the archive, the rail, the flea market. In Paris, Gabrielle Geppert’s Palais Royal arcade for vintage Chanel and Dior. In London, Rellik on Golborne Road for Westwood and Margiela, and Lovers Lane on Portobello for the early-2000s Galliano and Cavalli that the market has decided are the new blue chips. In Milan, Cavalli e Nastri – the boutique that persuaded the city to take vintage seriously back in 1988, with rails that run from the 1920s to the ’80s.
What to look for? Vintage Alaïa, the most coveted name on any archive rail. Westwood corsetry. An anonymous stranger’s Levi’s.
The Birkin stays home. I am flying back with somebody else’s Westwood — and it will have cost less than the excess baggage.
Source: Khaleej Times