Rah Rah for Raffia: How to Wear This Summer Staple the Street Style Way

Reported by Vogue.

Jane Birkin didn't just give us the basket bag — she made raffia a whole personality. Long before the leather Hermès tote that immortalized her name, Birkin was photographed pairing flared denim with woven straw carriers, and that effortless equation has never really left us. According to Vogue, the material's current revival traces back to spring 2021, when Loewe and The Row sent raffia down the runway and the fashion world took notes in pencil — then permanent marker.

The obsession only deepened from there. In his spring 2023 show, Simon Porte Jacquemus — the sun-drenched prodigy from Provence — staged a literal rainfall of straw, dressing models in oversized raffia hats that looked like they'd walked straight out of a Côte d'Azur dream sequence. It was maximalist, it was theatrical, and it confirmed what the street style crowd already knew: raffia isn't a trend. It's a temperature.

The Scandinavian School of Straw

Nowhere has raffia been worn with more conviction than in Scandinavia, where July and August bring near-endless daylight and, apparently, an instinct for elevated natural textures. The Nordic approach — unfussy, considered, quietly cool — turns out to be the perfect lens for this material. Labels like Tove and Hodakova are offering raffia dresses that read as wardrobe, not costume, while Danish brands Baum und Pferdgarten and MKDT Studio are extending the aesthetic down to footwear. Head-to-toe straw could have been a Halloween situation. Instead, it's a masterclass in tonal dressing.

The real reason raffia keeps coming back — beyond nostalgia, beyond the runway — is that it's genuinely hard to get wrong. It plays well with linen, commands attention against a slip dress, and grounds anything that risks looking too precious. It's tactile proof that the most interesting summer dressing often starts with what grows in the ground.

Raffia's staying power is no accident: it's what happens when a material earns its place in the wardrobe season after season, not just on the mood board.

Read the original at Vogue.