How to Transition Your Wardrobe: Summer → Autumn
Nae Vegan ShoesThere is a stretch of about six weeks every year when getting dressed is genuinely difficult. The mornings need a jacket, the afternoons do not, and your shoes are wrong by lunchtime. Stylists have names for it — the shoe gap, shoe purgatory — which tells you it is a real problem rather than a personal failing.
The instinct is to do the big swap: one Saturday, everything summer goes in a box, everything autumn comes out. It is the wrong move, and it is also the most expensive one, because it creates a wardrobe of things that are all slightly too warm for six weeks running.
The principle: add, don’t replace
Nearly every stylist writing about this season says a version of the same thing, and it is worth taking seriously because it saves money as well as effort: you are not switching wardrobes, you are layering around the one you have.
The summer dress does not get packed away — it gets a long-sleeved top underneath or a knit over it. The linen shirt becomes a light jacket worn open over a T-shirt. Shorts survive into September if the top half is warmer. The pieces that genuinely cannot make the trip are fewer than you would guess.
Two adjustments do most of the work. The first is texture: corduroy, knit and anything with a nap read as autumn even in the same colours you wore in July. The second is accessories — a scarf, a heavier hat, a pair of socks that shows. They cost little, take up no storage, and they shift a summer outfit into the season faster than replacing the outfit would.
A quick aside
We don’t claim to know it all, and we love to keep learning. So tell us in the comments and on our social media what works for you — your habits, your impressions, your ideas — and we will all learn from one another. In the meantime, here is what we have learned from reading and from experience.
Then do the feet in three stages
This is where the transition actually gets decided, and where most people (in our opinion) get it wrong by jumping straight to boots and then regretting it on a warm day, especially on a sunny afternoon.
Even so, keep a few warmer pieces to hand — not a whole wardrobe, just a few — for the erratic days that come more often than they used to, now that the climate emergency is making itself felt. But barring a sudden turn in the weather, our advice for most days is this:
Work out which stage your week is actually in, rather than which stage the calendar says it is. In much of southern Europe, stage one runs well into October. And stay flexible: as we said, be ready in case the weather breaks the pattern altogether.
Stage one: closed toe, nothing more
The single most useful move of the whole transition, and it costs nothing if you already own the right pair. Cover the toes and keep everything else the same.
A closed shoe with no lining and no insulation reads as autumn while behaving like summer. It works with the dresses and light trousers you have been wearing since June, and it stops the outfit looking stranded when the temperature drops four degrees. Loafers, low trainers, ballet flats and clogs all do this job.
From our range: BRENDA and LEVI are the loafers, which have the useful quality of looking deliberate with bare ankles and equally deliberate with a visible sock a month later. DOKA, MACKAY and AYA cover the trainer end for days that are still properly warm.
Clogs deserve a specific mention, because footwear writers keep singling them out as the natural bridge: they have the structure of a shoe, they take a sock happily once the mornings turn, and they still go on and off like a sandal. Our two winter-lined clogs, KOOD and MEDAN, are built for exactly this part of the year — lined with organic cotton, on a cork insole.
Stage two: the ankle boot takes over
Somewhere between ten and eighteen degrees, with rain in the forecast, the bridge shoes stop being enough. This is the longest stretch of autumn (if the weather behaves) and the one your wardrobe should be built around.
Ankle boots are the workhorse here. EVIE and KIMBER for a clean everyday shape; BECCA and CODY if you want a heavier sole and more hardware; DUNCAN and CHASE on the men’s side. Flat lace-ups belong here too — GRACE and BEN carry a smarter day without asking for a boot.
One styling note that comes up in every guide and is worth repeating: finish at the ankle. This kind of boot shaft should disappear under the trouser rather than fighting it, and cropped or cuffed hems make the whole thing look intentional.
Stage three: coverage, and distance from the ground
When it is consistently below ten degrees and wet, two things start to matter that did not before. Coverage — the more leg a boot encloses, the less exposed skin there is to lose heat, which is why a knee-high like BETIA or RUBY does more than any amount of extra material around the ankle. And sole depth, because a thicker, more profiled sole puts physical distance between your foot and cold ground.
If you want the longer version of why that works, we went into it in our piece on whether vegan boots are as warm as leather ones.
Three things that matter in autumn and not in July
- Grip. Wet leaves on a pavement are genuinely slippery, and a smooth summer sole has nothing to offer. A textured outsole is the least glamorous feature on a shoe and the one you will be most grateful for.
- Room for a sock. A shoe that fits perfectly barefoot in August is a shoe that pinches in October. If you are buying now, try it with the sock you will actually wear.
- Something between you and the ground. Cold travels up through a thin sole faster than most people expect. It is the cheapest warmth in footwear and nobody markets it.
Before you put the summer pairs away
Ten minutes now saves a pair in March. Here is a small piece of advice that may feel like a chore right now, but you will probably be grateful for it in a few months. Shoes that go into a box dirty come out worse than they went in: salt, sand and dried sweat carry on working all winter.
- Clean them properly and let them dry fully at room temperature — never on a radiator, which damages soles and adhesives.
- Store them with shape, loosely stuffed rather than crushed at the back of a cupboard.
- Somewhere dry and dark. Damp is what ruins stored footwear; sunlight fades it.
- Be honest about the pair you did not wear once. If it survived a whole summer unworn, it is not waiting for next year — it is waiting for someone else. Pass it on now while it still has a life in it.
Our care guide has the full routine for vegan materials, and it applies just as much to storage as to daily wear.
If you are buying one thing
Buy for stage two. It is the longest part of the season, the part your current wardrobe is least equipped for, and the pair you will get most days out of. Stage one usually already exists in your cupboard (and some of it can be worn on the odd day all year round); stage three is a few weeks a year for most of us. The season’s arrivals are in what’s new, and we have written up the boots and the shoes separately for anyone who wants the detail rather than the overview.
