Over the winter you wrote that it was impossible to look stylish in the cold. Now that we are in high summer, is it possible to look stylish in the heat?

Tessa, London

Apologies for any typos today, readers. You see, I am writing this from a city that seems to believe that 33°C is a perfectly reasonable daily temperature in the summer and so my fingers are likely to slip on the keys due to the oleaginous puddles of sweat that have pooled all around my person. Fmsbgjksdnv.

So as the above paragraph may have hinted, my answer to your question, Tess, is no. To be honest, you're lucky I bothered to get dressed at all to write an answer to you and, yes, I do call wearing five-year-old beach cover-up "getting dressed", thanks for asking.

No matter how many fashion spreads with imaginative headlines such as "Summer in the City!", "White Heat" or, classily, "Hot to Trot", it is no more possible to look good in the height of summer than it is in the dead of winter. Extreme temperatures and style go together like Rupert Murdoch and journalistic ethics – something's gotta give.

And that's just fine. Look, I am far too busy wondering how I'm going to walk home from work today without an air-conditioner affixed to one of my shoulders to worry about whether I should be working the big shoulder look this month. There are times when, actually, wearing a new dress is not going to make you feel better. It will make you feel filled with irritation at the thought of the upcoming dry cleaning bill for getting the sweat stains out of your new dress. The only thing that will make you feel better is if Steve Jobs could invent a tiny machine to provide you with a portable personal cooling system.

Tessa, I applaud your dedication to the cause but despite what the Daily Mail might lead you to believe in its slavering fascination with how celebrities dress on their summer holidays, no one's expecting anyone to look good in the heat. Some days, just putting on one's bra is a goddamn achievement.

What are your thoughts on "womb brooms"? I hear they are gaining in popularity again.

David, by email

Now look, sir. I appreciate that this is a fashion column and therefore any political partiality would look not just unprofessional but irrelevant but, I'm sorry, get out! Out, damn you! Get your hideous terminology off my page. Honestly, you people, are there no depths to which you will not stoop? Wait, what? I'm sorry, did you say that "womb broom" is the new term for a soul patch and not the latest offensive term for "abortion" cooked up America's far right? I'm sorry, I shall lower my pointing finger and sit calmly down.

But wait, I cry, jumping up again and beginning to jab the air once more! You say soul patches are back? And they are now called "womb brooms"? Oh dear Lord, I just DESPAIR of the human race!

Now, even leaving aside the name (although I would interject here that if this is, as I'm told it is, a reference to cunnilingus, chaps, if you think that part of your face should be in a woman's womb during aforementioned activity, then you're doing it wrong), this – what, facial topiary? People help me here, please – THING clearly reeks of wrongness. Apparently having a dot of hair beneath one's bottom lip does not – incredibly – cause you personal irritation seeing as you sport it, and presumably the tender grooming of it on a daily basis does not grate you either. But allow me to assure you that it both annoys and grates on onlookers.

One day, I would just love for a man who has a soul patch/womb broom to explain to me the thinking behind the cultivation of this look, but he'd have to do it by telephone because, clearly, a face-to-face encounter would just be impossible. Looking at someone who has one makes me want to get out a hanky and wipe it off their faces, as though it were a stray kernel of corn.

In a way, as much as it makes me cross my legs, I'm quite grateful to this new terminology for the damned thing. This, at last, captures the wrongness of the look and will surely convey to any deluded women or men who are currently with a be-womb-broomed gentleman the urgency with which they need to persuade the latter to shave it off. The name is as illogical as the sporting thereof, and almost as hideous. Chaps, go to a mirror, watch yourself saying the words "womb broom", then reach for the Gillette.