Can Brits do the Med look?

If you closed your eyes today, turned to face the sun and let your mind wander a bit, it was almost possible to believe you were no longer in London but basking instead in the Mediterranean sunshine.

With scarcely a cloud in the sky, the temperatures were soon nudging 30C: just like the Mediterranean.

Cafés were putting tables out on the pavement for people to enjoy a spot of al fresco cappuccino: just like the Mediterranean. The air was rich with the aroma of freshly-ground coffee and pizzas baking: just like the Mediterranean.

Then you opened your eyes, and everywhere all those lovely pavement cafés were filled with pale, overdressed English men and women, looking about as un-Mediterranean as it is possible to get.

Some people, perhaps trained by regular holidays abroad and helped by the odd tip from the fashion pages, managed to get it right. Others were, shall we say, more climactically challenged.

Take friends Clare O'Connell and Ben Lasserson, for instance, who were perhaps each as decent a role model as you are likely to get this side of St Tropez.

She was dressed in a green skirt and black strapless top and wore flip-flops that revealed perfectly manicured toes rather than the calloused monstrosities too often seen on the streets of London.

It is not that rare to see a well turned out young woman in London in the summer. Men, however, are an entirely different matter: the fashion crimes that are committed in the name of shorts and sandals are too appalling to catalogue here.

Yet somehow Ben nearly carried it off (perhaps he is not really English after all).

Do the Brits get it right when it comes to dressing for the summer sunshine? "They just take all their clothes off, don't they?" said Clare, 29, a cellist from Lambeth.

Ben, 27, a musician-turned-lawyer from Kensington, reckons we're slowly getting better at it. "Men have finally decided to take their feet out," he said.

Whether or not that is a good thing depends on the feet of course.

In St Christopher's Place, off Oxford Street, Toby Hall and Rob Blore were two chartered surveyors enjoying a mid-morning coffee of whom it could most kindly be said that they were doing their best under difficult circumstances. When you are an office-bound male it is hard to escape the dark suit and black leather laceups. "You're going to be hot whatever you wear," said Rob, 32, from Guildford. "But as long as you're fairly respectable that's okay."

One concession is over ties. When it is this hot they put them on for meetings but that is about it. "Wearing a tie in the office is more honoured in the breach than the observance," said Toby, 37, from Kew.

One pair able to offer an expert opinion on how the British coped with café culture are David Walker-Smith, head of menswear at Selfridge's, and Susanne Tide-Frater, the store's head of creative direction, who were having a business meeting at a café off Oxford Street

Do's and don'ts for men? "When men leave bits of their office attire mixed with their holiday gear, that's a don't," said David. "Office socks with shorts. Hard shoes with shorts. But I think men here getting it more right, because of the icon culture." Icon? Suffice to say he used to wear a No 7 shirt.

Susanne agreed the British were getting better at café society but still had a lot to learn. "French café culture is about socialising, being seen. They are natural at it. In British cafés you can't see out - you have to sit with your back to the action.

"Here the pavements are not quite wide enough to accommodate it - hence you're sitting in the middle of all those fumes."