Most summer dresses look brilliant in photographs and feel suffocating by noon. Cotton fixes that. It breathes properly, washes without ceremony, and gets better looking the more you wear it. That is not a small thing when you are living in a dress from June through to September.

What we have pulled together here are cotton dresses that actually hold up across a real summer. The kind you wear to a barbecue and then straight to the pub. The kind that survives being stuffed into a holiday bag and emerges without looking like a catastrophe. Midi lengths that work with flat sandals on hot days and trainers when the temperature drops unexpectedly. Shirt dresses that are not trying too hard. Sundresses with enough structure that you do not spend the day tugging at them.

We have been specific because vague does not help anyone. The fabrication matters, the cut matters, whether the pockets are real or decorative matters enormously. These are the cotton dresses we would actually recommend to a friend who asked. Genuinely wearable, genuinely summer. Not a compromise.