The dreaded packing begins. Every year you try to plan your holiday wardrobe, remembering that you rarely wear everything you take and forget some things you had toyed with taking, but it seems no matter how many times you try it, it just won’t fit and you have to leave something behind, but it’s can’t be that pair of new shoes or the season’s must have hat. Whether you actually think you will wear them or not is irrelevant.
With baggage prices and restrictions increasing every year, it seems we are being forced to get better at packing. We are trying to get out whole holiday wardrobes into just 10kg of hand luggage, to avoid paying the extortionate baggage fees applied by some airlines. So savvy packing is becoming a fine art, hence why there are now websites devoted to it.
So, here are a few short and sweet packing tips that may just make all the difference.
Check the weather a day or two before you fly. Find out the average temperature, whether it’s going to be sunny, windy, rainy or a combination. You can then plan your outfits accordingly.
Plan out each outfit with the key trends of the season that you want to wear whilst on holiday, bearing in mind the previous point about the weather of course. There should be just three or four key looks you want to wear then for the days in between, you need to mix and match items from each trend. The only way to get this right is to try every outfit on in front of the mirror before hand.
Go for three statement pieces, which this summer should be a maxi dress or 1950s style capped sleeve shift dress, a pair of bell-bottom flares and boxy blazer. Luckily for you, this season there is a lot of cross over between styles, and the hippy chick fashions of the late 60s and early 70s seem to infiltrate every trend.
You should use accessories to differentiate these outfits. You can add a cropped denim waistcoat to the maxi for a relaxed daytime look or platformed wedges for the evening. For the flares you can wear a print t-shirt by day or tunic and floppy hat for a smarter city-chic look. The blazer can be worn with the bell-bottoms or with crisp, which denim shorts. If you chose a shift dress you can take this from day to night simply by changing your shoes from flats to platforms.
Don’t bother taking a week’s worth of individual items, mixing and matching is the only way to optimise your luggage allowance.
