Its Selfie Time

So less is more—but only to a degree. If the dress is very short then it is too obviously sexual. And then, because the wearer has to make sure that the dress is not too revealing, she is all the time having to pull it down or restrict her movements, thereby contradicting one of the essential purposes of the summer dress: absolute freedom of movement. (There is an interesting potential exception to this: the tennis dress is in some ways a sub-set of the summer dress but if it has to be accompanied by special underwear—underwear designed to be seen by the world at large—then the tennis dress stops being a summer dress and becomes purely a tennis dress. In short, it is possible to play tennis in a summer dress but it is not always possible to wear a tennis dress as a summer dress.)