Notes from the atelier, on the one part of a holiday you can actually control before you leave.
Packing for a beach holiday goes wrong in the same way every time. You pack for the beach, and then discover that you spend perhaps two hours a day on sand, and the other ten at breakfast, walking through a town, sitting in a courtyard at dusk, or having dinner somewhere that expects more than a cover-up.
The result is a suitcase full of swimwear and one dress you end up wearing four nights in a row.
Here is how we pack instead, and the reasoning behind it.
Start from the hours, not the days
Count the kinds of hours in your trip rather than the number of days. A week away is usually something like this:
- Water hours: swimsuit, a cover-up, nothing else matters.
- In-between hours: the longest block by far. Breakfast, the walk into town, the market, the afternoon in the shade.
- Evening hours: dinner, a bar, the one night that turns out to matter.
Most people over-pack the first and under-pack the second. The in-between hours are where a holiday wardrobe is won or lost, and they are the reason a single well-chosen dress outperforms four separate outfits.
Choose a dress that works from day to night
This is the whole trick, and it comes down to four properties. A dress that has all four earns a place; one that has three does not.
It should be a natural fibre. Adire crepe is cotton. It breathes in a way that a polyester resort dress never will, and that is what you notice by the second hot afternoon. The trade is that cotton creases. We would make that trade every time, and the packing notes further down are how we handle it.
It has to be light. Both in weight and in what it asks of you. Heat makes anything structured feel like a mistake by the second afternoon.
It has to change register with accessories alone. Flat sandals and bare skin at noon; a metallic sandal and gold at the ears at nine. If a dress needs a different silhouette to become an evening dress, it is two dresses and you have room for neither.
It should not read as beachwear. A sarong or a terry cover-up cannot follow you into a restaurant. A real dress can go anywhere the day takes it.
Why a backless maxi belongs in the suitcase
The Alara halter maxi dress is the piece we travel with, and it is worth being specific about why rather than simply asserting it.
The crepe breathes. It is cotton, light and loosely cut, which is the combination that matters in real heat. It creases, as all cotton does, so it wants a hanger on arrival rather than a shortcut.
The open back is climate control. In genuine heat, an open back does more for comfort than any amount of loose fit at the front. This is the practical case for the cut, and it is rarely made.
One dress, three registers. The same piece covers the walk into town, lunch, and dinner, changed only by what is on your feet and in your ears.
It is not a beach dress. We want to be clear about this: it is not designed to be swum in or soaked. It is a resort dress for the terrace, the town, the table, and that is exactly why it earns its space.
If the open back is the part you are unsure about, we wrote a full guide to it: how to wear a backless dress covers what to wear underneath, how to accessorise it, and where it works.
Three ways to wear it on holiday
By the pool or after the water. Over a swimsuit for the walk back, hair wet and pushed off the face, bare feet or a flat leather sandal. Nothing at the ears. The dress is doing all of it.
Brunch, the market, the walk into town. Flat sandals, a straw or woven bag, sunglasses, hair up. One pair of earrings. This is the outfit that will appear in most of your photographs, which is worth knowing in advance.
Dinner. A metallic or gold sandal, or a low block heel. Gold at the ears. Hair up so the back reads. Nothing at the neck: the neckline is gathered high and a necklace has nowhere to sit. This is the same dress you wore at eleven in the morning, and no one will recognise it.
👉 Shop the Alara vacation dress →
What shoes and accessories to actually pack
Three pairs of shoes is the honest maximum for a beach holiday, and most people need two.
- A flat leather sandal that survives sand, stone and a wooden deck.
- One metallic or dressier sandal for evenings. This is the pair that lets a daytime dress go out to dinner.
- Something closed only if there is a hike, a boat, or a city day in the plan.
Jewellery: one strong idea, repeated. A single pair of earrings you wear all week beats a pouch of options you never open. Woven raffia earrings are the ones we travel with: they come from the same making tradition as the cloth, they weigh nothing, and they do not tarnish in salt air.
A bag that folds, a wide-brimmed hat if you will genuinely wear it, and one fine shawl. The shawl does more work than anything else in the case: shoulders in a church, air conditioning on the flight home, a cool evening on a terrace.
How to pack a maxi dress without losing half your case
Fold it lengthwise, then roll it loosely. Rolling beats folding for a fluid fabric because it produces soft curves instead of hard creases. A maxi rolls down to roughly the volume of a jumper.
Put it in last, on top. Nothing heavy on top of it.
Hang it up the moment you arrive. A crepe releases most of what it picked up in transit within a couple of hours on a hanger.
If a crease persists, hang it in the bathroom while you shower. Steam settles cotton better than pressing does. If you do iron, use a cool setting on the reverse of the cloth, never a hot iron directly on the hand-dyed face.
Choosing an Alara print for your destination
Each length of Adire is resist-dyed by hand, so the motifs shift and vary from piece to piece, so yours will not be identical to the photograph, or to anyone else’s. A few we would match to a trip.
Golden Marigold : a bright marigold gold lit with ivory batik. Tropical light, strong sun, green everywhere. It holds its own against a landscape that is already loud.
Cobalt Indigo : a deep cobalt with pale ivory diamonds and chevrons. The Mediterranean one: blue against whitewash and stone. The easiest of the group to accessorise, and the most classic.
Terracotta Sand : warm terracotta with sand-coloured leaf and scroll motifs. A desert resort, a dry landscape, adobe and clay. The most neutral piece here and the one that disappears into its setting in the best way.
Sunset Coral : a warm coral red spread with ivory palmette motifs. An island, a boat, the hour before dinner.
Antique Olive : antique olive with pale scrolling motifs. Vineyards, olive groves, a countryside stay rather than a shoreline.
Because every batch of Adire is hand-dyed in small quantities, a print may not come back once it has gone.
The short version
- Pack for the in-between hours, not for the water. That is where the time actually goes.
- One dress that changes register with accessories beats three that only do one thing.
- A natural fibre beats a synthetic in heat, and the creasing is a trade worth making.
- Two pairs of shoes, one pair of earrings, one shawl.
- Roll, pack last, hang on arrival.
If you take one piece, take the one that can go from the pool to the table without a change of silhouette. That is the whole argument for a fluid maxi, and it is why ours goes in our case first.
👉 Shop the Alara vacation dress →
Written at L’atelier KaAy, where we design these pieces, photograph them ourselves, and travel with them.