Dressed for Nowhere: How Men's Resort Wear Became the Most Covetable Fashion Category of the Year
You do not need a yacht. You do not need a villa in Positano. You do not, strictly speaking, need anywhere to go at all. Resort wear does not care about your itinerary.
Let us be honest about something. The majority of men currently wearing resort wear have no resort to go to. They are not reclining on a sun-bleached terrace in Capri with a Negroni and a dog-eared Lampedusa novel. They are on the 07:42 from Surbiton, wearing beautifully cut linen trousers and a camp-collar shirt in a shade of terracotta that suggests the Amalfi Coast and actually came from a very nice website while their wife was watching television. They look magnificent. The point is not where you are. The point is how you feel.
Resort wear, defined loosely as the category of luxury clothing designed for warm-weather leisure and defined precisely as whatever makes a man feel like he is on holiday when he categorically is not, has quietly become the most talked-about menswear category of the past two years. Sales of linen shirts at premium retailers are up significantly. Camp collars have replaced the button-down as the collar of choice among men who think carefully about these things. Tailored shorts, once the exclusive territory of very old men in Cannes and very young men at festivals, are being worn by perfectly reasonable adults in their thirties and forties who have simply decided that life is short and their legs are fine.
Resort wear, defined loosely as the category of luxury clothing designed for warm-weather leisure and defined precisely as whatever makes a man feel like he is on holiday when he categorically is not, has quietly become the most talked-about menswear category of the past two years. Sales of linen shirts at premium retailers are up significantly. Camp collars have replaced the button-down as the collar of choice among men who think carefully about these things. Tailored shorts, once the exclusive territory of very old men in Cannes and very young men at festivals, are being worn by perfectly reasonable adults in their thirties and forties who have simply decided that life is short and their legs are fine.
The movement owes a considerable debt to a handful of Italian and Spanish designers who have spent decades insisting that dressing well and dressing comfortably are not opposing ambitions. Brunello Cucinelli, the philosopher-king of elevated leisurewear, has made an empire from the proposition that a man should look as though he has just stepped off a boat, even if the closest he has come to nautical activity this year is watching a documentary about the America's Cup. His linen blazers cost more than most people's holidays and are worth every penny.
The democratisation of the aesthetic, however, is what makes the current moment genuinely exciting. Resort dressing is no longer the exclusive language of men who actually own property in the Mediterranean. Brands at every price point have understood that what men want is not fast fashion but considered clothing, pieces that suggest ease and confidence and the faint implication that the wearer has somewhere interesting to be, even when that somewhere is a garden centre in Hertfordshire.
The democratisation of the aesthetic, however, is what makes the current moment genuinely exciting. Resort dressing is no longer the exclusive language of men who actually own property in the Mediterranean. Brands at every price point have understood that what men want is not fast fashion but considered clothing, pieces that suggest ease and confidence and the faint implication that the wearer has somewhere interesting to be, even when that somewhere is a garden centre in Hertfordshire.
The rules, such as they are, are reassuringly few. Linen is always correct. Colour is permitted, even encouraged, though restraint is still a virtue. A pair of well-made espadrilles will do more for an outfit than almost any other single purchase. Accessories should look as though they were acquired casually rather than chosen obsessively, even if the opposite is true. The whole effect should communicate a man who has dressed with care but would find it faintly embarrassing to admit it.
There is, underneath all of this, a deeper cultural current. Men are finally beginning to enjoy clothes again. Not in the self-conscious, heavily curated way of the fashion industry, but in the way of someone who has discovered that putting on a beautiful shirt on a Tuesday morning genuinely improves the Tuesday. Resort wear is aspirational not because it implies wealth but because it implies leisure, pleasure and the radical proposition that looking good is a reasonable thing to want.
You still do not need the yacht. Though it would not hurt!
You still do not need the yacht. Though it would not hurt!
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