"Wear a towel instead of a coat - it's very chic," declared her majesty Vivienne Westwood, a longtime advocate of sustainable thinking in fashion. Orating as only she can to the New Economics Forum last year, the designer repeated her conviction that consumers are too reliant on disposable fashion. She believes that clothes should be bought to last, and bought less frequently. "I think we should stop buying clothes for six months," she said. But of course, cleverly, she didn't say anything about not buying towels; instead, she went and made this beauty. So while restraint and normalcy have never been Westwood's strongest suites, this towel from her archive is designed to be a versatile - even practical - statement for summer. As an emblem of London cool and Britishness, the claret and blue towel can be worn as a scarf or sarong, but will most likely find its perfect place beside the seaside. The ultra-limited World's End collection is named after and sold in the King's Road shop formerly known as Sex, and rooted in favourite pieces and prints from Westwood's half-century in fashion. Before spring/summer turns to autumn/winter, there seems every chance that we'll witness the end of the world as we know it; but as long as we're on a beach without sand down our shorts, we're sure we'll feel pretty fine.

Men's grooming has come a long way since the 1980s rites of passage of julienning your face with a plastic razor and spraying the Lynx so enthusiastically that you couldn't see the other side of the changing room. Nowadays, it's difficult to grow up oblivious to the sea of moisturisers, shaving balms and hair styling options promising to fix your flaws at every turn. But after a winter of skin-parching cold and indoor heat, your face does need more than a cat's lick, and after its growing pains, the menswear grooming industry does seem to be maturing, with a new breed of products that aren't muskily fragranced, covered in shiny silver lettering, or otherwise trying too hard to be manly but aren't too fussy, either. You don't want to have to carry a portable beauty cabinet, but you do want a bottle of something to freshen up with. The new Super range from Dr. Perricone is the latest case in point, being a range of midpriced skincare products made without parabens, colours or added fragrances. That's not to say they don't smell, though - the Super name refers to various superfood ingredients and when we tried them out, someone gleefully shouted: "This one smells like Haribo!" Dr. (Nicholas) Perricone made his name selling anti-ageing creams, but the Super range goes from sun protection to applescented spot serum and hand and cuticle cream.

Paul Smith is, to a large extent, the man behind the modern recognition of British menswear and - as we discover elsewhere in this issue - still someone who makes time to watch out for the wellbeing of the scene and its new talents. This season, his collection is one of many menswear offerings based around the colour blue. That in itself hardly constitutes a trend, of course - blue is arguably the most dependable and widely deployed colour in men's clothes per se - but the spring/summer collections were all about taking the colour out of the realms of practicality and back into a painterly phase. From navy to azure, lapis to indigo, the whole tonal spectrum of blue was presented on the Milan and Paris menswear catwalks and a siren call for designers at Versace, Kenzo, Margiela, Trussardi and Louis Vuitton. Paul Smith's collection was a contemporary salute to his London mod roots; loud, bright and true. With this shirt, Smith's icy and oil hues conjure a variety of shades that manage to be both sun-faded and saturated. Cut high like a cardigan or Harrington jacket, it's also bang on a second trend: our current fixation for smart shirts and jackets evolving into light summer garments that take tailoring somewhere fresh.