White short sleeve dresses for hot city days and vacations

When the city gets sticky, we reach for a white short sleeve dress, and this page collects ours in muslin, linen, soft jersey and satin. Most of them are minis. They’re from the summer line, so it’s a page for planning your warm months.

Linen, muslin or satin when it’s ninety outside

Thin cotton muslin is our favorite for heat. We use it for a lot of the printed minis here, from cornflowers to tiny pink flowers to hearts. It wrinkles a little after washing, and a steamer sorts that out in a minute.

Linen is the other summer fabric we sew with. One linen midi is made of crinkled linen, where the creases are there on purpose. You can sit in a car for two hours and it still won’t look rumpled when you get out.

Prefer something smoother? We cut one off-shoulder mini from a soft jersey that barely creases, and two dresses from satin with a matte, silky finish. The dotted midi that ties in a bow under the chin is one of them. Elastane makes up 2 % of that fabric and polyester the rest, and you’ll feel that slight give as you walk. The silhouette is loose too, so it’s easy to spend a whole day in.

Off the shoulder, a wrap or a square neck

Plenty of the styles here bare your shoulders. Those look best with small earrings and no necklace at all. The knee-length one in white broderie fabric is fine for a workplace where the dress code is casual.

Wrap minis tie at the waist, so you decide how snug they sit. Do you have wider hips than shoulders? Try the puff-sleeve dress with ruffles and a belt, because the waist is clearly marked and the skirt falls loose.

Sizes go from XS to XL. For off-shoulder cuts we’d check your bust first, since that elastic line has to stay put while you wave at someone across the street.

More white is waiting in our white summer page. If bare shoulders are the plan, see white off-the-shoulder cuts, and other colors with the same sleeve are in short-sleeved dresses.