AMONG the things that many of us still enjoy about this time of year is the chance to wear fewer clothes.

Even if it rains until September we continue to peel off to a Mediterranean brevity, stoical in the belief that somehow these last days of summer will buck up before autumn delivers further lashings. Edinburgh’s festivals are a valiant example of such optimism. Women swish along George Street and into the rain-battered tents of Charlotte Square wearing floor-length Riviera dresses which might have stepped straight from a Matisse. And men in pale linen affect a look just crumpled enough to make them appear artistically laconic.

It’s amazing, though, that our volatile summer hasn’t seen off the naked shoulder. In every Festival queue, there it is, topping out those long dresses whose tiny bodices recklessly expose more body than soul. Men, too, are shedding layers in a way that once would have prohibited any chance of moving in elevated company. The sight of shirtsleeves in the Usher Hall used to be considered vulgar unless, of course, the shirtsleeves were on stage. Now they’re visible in both the stalls and the grand circle, and with the Assembly Rooms crowd you get the shirt-tales as well.

In the photographic archives of Edinburgh en fete you can chart the growth of prancing narcissism in Britain. When the Festival began in 1947, a sports jacket, flannels and brown shoes were the only casual ensemble available to men whose style was trapped between Bertie Wooster and clothing coupons frugality. But with the appointment of Lord Harewood as Festival director in 1961, the male approach to festive apparel suddenly had licence embrace flamboyance.

Although shy by nature, Harewood, a first cousin of the Queen, didn’t shrink from the exotic but paraded it with embroidered kaftans and brocaded Nehru jackets, regally ignoring any Edinburgh harrumphs. He died aged 88 last July, prompting Festival elders to recall occasions when he was so exuberantly dressed that he was amiably regarded as the Liberace of high culture. But by the mid-1970s, when Austrian-born Peter Diamand was boss, Festival-goers reverted to conformity. Women drifted into post-theatre supper parties in Laura Ashley’s decorous retro frills and flounces while men reverted to dark lounge suits consolidating that clubbish look whereby all seem to have been born with the same tailor.

But with the arrival of John Drummond – Diamand’s witty, acerbic successor – the pale linen suit was in the ascendant; a style of studied nonchalance with just the right un-pressed bagginess to suggest a creative non-conformist within. Drummond, regarded as one of the last great impresarios, was also, in David Attenborough’s view, a man with “an unlimited capacity for indignation”. Nonchalance was one thing, but a look of over-contrived indifference earned his public contempt.

During one of his press conferences, Drummond railed against “those middle-aged men” who attended the Festival wearing “baseball caps turned the wrong way round because they don’t want to grow up.” Today no one gives a second glance to such backwards affectation. Jonathan Mills, the present director and a risk-taking Australian, doesn’t waste wit on withering put-downs. But although festivities allow the opportunity for dressing up in whatever manner, we remain more restrained than the Italians, French and Germans, whose lust for First Night opulence still gleams.

Yet nothing quite matches the elan of a certain Mme Bricard who, before the Second World War, entered her customary box at L’Opera in Paris, gowned so exquisitely she was, by all accounts, a symphony in chic, and on her head she wore a hat to end all millinery: a helmet of polished straw anchored above the brow by one outstanding pearl. “Men always notice details,” she advised female friends. “And when a gentleman wishes to send flowers, I tell him: ‘my florist is Cartier’.” Now, that’s narcissism for you, and today there is little room for it in the handbook of women’s hard-won principles. Call it a blessing, or call it a shame, but Mme Bricard’s playful self-aggrandisement has gone the way of the top hat.