0 The Investment Dresser: Anoraks

It being high summer with a bank holiday on the horizon, it would be a dereliction of duty not to alert you to the one truly essential item of a British wardrobe. Not a silk-chiffon Valentino maxi, I'm afraid, but an anorak.

Other nations get to swan through August in summery clothes. We must face reality and pop into Millets. All right, maybe not Millets. We don't need to be that hard on ourselves. The aristocracy has taken to the grouse moors in beautiful, bespoke lichen-coloured tweeds for aeons, so presumably the concept of luxurious outward-boundy clothes is embedded in our DNA.

Weirdly, though, I put up with lamentable weatherproofs for years. Each August I'd drag out a cagoule, pac-a-mac or something equally depressing. Then a few years ago I noticed they no longer passed muster. Fashion had colonised the parka. Barbour had revamped its waxed offering. Quilted nylon had gone all Prada.

I've got a repertoire of anoraks now. Obviously I don't call them anoraks. That really is defeatist. I don't call them anything. But I think of them respectively as the Urban Quilt and the Mossy. The first is from Uniqlo. I've worn it so much, winter and summer, I've now invested in two versions, long and short. Advantages include supreme lightness and warmth, but not monsoon resistance.

Mossy, on the other hand (named after you-know-who), is like a portable but chic tent. An architecturally stiff, but not too stiff, khaki canvas parka from Aquascutum, it works in the city and country or on a beach. It's extremely flattering: narrow over the shoulders yet sufficiently voluminous and long to make your legs look slim even in cropped white J Brands. It has a proper hood, yet amazingly you don't look completely repellent with it pulled up, perhaps because it's big enough not to squash your hair. All in, it's beautifully designed, but clever enough not to make you look a total tosser, in a shade that works with a disappointing pallor: proof that splurging on an anorak is the sanest response to a British summer.

From left: Waxed cotton, £449, Barbour Gold Label by Temperley, barbour.com , Polyester, £16.99, New Look, newlook.com , Raincoating, £185, Toast, toast.co.uk .