You’d be forgiven for assuming that there’s not much to a pair of swim trunks — that all the beach requires is a bit of cotton, polyester and elastane, hastily stitched together and secured with a drawstring. For many men, such a pair of trunks (and the low price at which they sell) is perfectly adequate; certainly there’s no need to give them the same consideration as, say, a tailored dinner jacket?
Adam Brown disagreed. Born in Malaya and raised during his childhood years between Hong Kong and Japan, he was a working photographer when he went on holiday with some friends to Rajasthan in 2005. It was there that he felt the need for a “not a swim short, but a short you can swim in.” A well-traveled professional who loves a good beach holiday, Brown founded his namesake brand with a business partner, Julia Simpson-Orlebar, in 2007 in order to design and deliver a pair of swim trunks that more closely resembled a well-tailored pair of trousers than the sale-rack stuff seen at your local shopping center.
The idea was that this pair of trunks would be able to easily shift between the pool, the beach and more elegant settings with ease, transitioning from one to the next while maintaining a sense of elegance and timelessness. The devil would be in the details: Each pair would be constructed from 60 different parts, sourced and fabricated in Europe with double stitching and incorporating side tabs for precise adjustment while maintaining a tailored silhouette. The idea worked: The shorts were picked up by small boutiques and larger department stores, and several celebrity sightings — among them Daniel Craig as 007 in 2012’s Skyfall — made business quickly explode. In 2018, following its meteoric rise within the menswear community, Chanel acquired the brand.
Brown, who remained as creative director — Simpson-Orlebar left in 2008 — has since inked partnerships with iconic locations and franchises: Hotel du Cap Eden Roc, The Beverly Hills Hotel and The Mark Hotel among them. This summer, he’s teaming up with fellow designer JJ Martins and her brand La Double J on a genderless summer capsule of swim shorts, bathing suits, shirting, dresses and more, all of which shares common patterns and silhouettes that have come to define the two companies. Bright colors, floral motifs and original prints abound in the High Vibration Vacation collection, which conjures images of poolside cocktails and the dry heat of the Mediterranean. And though the collection is divided between more conventional men’s and women’s pieces, the ideas is that anyone should be able to wear any piece they like — which is indeed already the case for Orlebar Brown, which has a sizable female clientele who enjoy wearing its swim trunks atop a bathing suit.
We caught up with Adam Brown to discuss his brand’s origins, the collaboration with La Double J and what sets apart a pair of OB swim trunks in a crowded marketplace.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
InsideHook: Swimwear is a particular niche within menswear and perhaps not the one that every designer flocks to. What is it about the idea of an exotic holiday, or about the comfort of loungewear and swimwear, that attracted you to it?
Adam Brown: I suppose that I’ve always loved holidays, and that’s not in a superficial sense, but more in a sense of what holidays bring. There’s a sense of travel, a sense of meeting people, a sense of trying to immerse yourself in different cultures or different languages or eat different food or experience different music — whatever it is. I was born in Malaya and I lived in Hong Kong and Japan. My grandmother, who I lived with, always used to tell me stories about travel. But then there’s that whole element of culture, music, food.
But there’s also the element of memories and of emotional engagement with a sense of place and a sense of activity, whether it’s a party or a wedding or going traveling with friends or particular things that happened. There are things that you look back on in years to come. Then there was a particular moment in Rajasthan where I had to change for lunch, which inspired “not a swim short, but a short you can swim in” — the founding principle for all of Orlebar Brown. And that really went on to inform everything the brand has evolved into over the last 17 years. So the idea of transition, the idea of a product that can take you from one place to another. Not a swim short — you don’t just wear it in the pool or by the beach, but you can actually wear it to have lunch in town and to do more than just sit by the beach. It’s based on the traditional pattern of a man’s pair of trousers; there are 60 elements, a five-year guarantee, that sort of thing.
Right at the beginning, it wasn’t lost on me that every brand you can mention always has a pair of swim shorts in the collection, but no brand had built a collection around a pair of shorts. And I think the last thing anybody needed was another rail of clothes or just another collection. We’re all swamped with products. But the idea seemed fairly obvious to me at the very beginning that if you put a particular activity [at the center] — whether it’s running or health or yoga or mountaineering or whatever — the storytelling opportunities became far greater. And Vilbrequin was around, but there wasn’t really anybody else.
So for me, that always seemed like an opportunity and a good starting place for Orlebar Brown. There was that historical thing, my childhood — the idea came on holiday — but there was also the opportunity and the fact that no other brands had actually put out a collection around swim or built a brand around holidays. This concept of sunshine travel, happiness and good times — it just seemed like a very positive, up, happy place to found a brand. So all those elements lined up in quite a nice way to get the story going and to get the brand kicked off.
Stuff We Swear By: I’ll Never Have Another Beach Day Without This Inflatable Pillow
The Ballast Beach Pillow is an ingenious invention. Seriously.IH: The Orlebar Brown silhouettes and style seem to have a good deal of mid-century influence. (You even have a collection featuring beautiful Slim Aarons photographs.) Could you speak to that bit — to the origins of the designs?
AB: I’m very happy to hear you say that, because that’s absolutely our intention. I’m not a fashion designer. Right at the very early stages, the challenge for me was, “How do you make this feel current?” It should have been relevant five years ago, and it should be relevant in five years time. The idea of buying something that’s only relevant for three to six months or a year always seemed like a bit of a waste of time. And I think the concept of making something that has longevity and that has a lifespan that’s far longer than you initially intended feels good.
The silhouettes — that was absolutely right at the very beginning. So whether it’s the toweling polo shirts or whether it’s the Sebastian polo shirt — which has the sort of buttoned, tailored approach — or the swim shorts, they’ll clearly stand the test of time. They’re 17 years, 18 years old now and nothing has changed on them. And so that principle was there at the beginning and it’s still something we challenge ourselves on; the element of timelessness and words like “classic” — which is overused — it’s always there.
The Slim Aarons pieces came out on our fifth anniversary when everybody said, “Where does the Orlebar Brown experience exist? Where am I in the Caribbean? Am I dancing on a table in Ibiza? Am I walking around a museum somewhere in a capital city? What is this? Where is this holiday?” And obviously we all know the Slim Aarons photographs, but it’s just that opportunity to tell a visual story in a far clearer way than through words. The photographic shorts that we produced just instantly gave the customer an understanding of what the brand is — that element of timelessness, that element of classic, that thing. And those photographs have stood the test of time and they’re still looked at and still very popular and requested, but there’s still an essence and a spirit and a feeling to them that feels very relevant to OB.
So the initial intention was to be timeless. And [Slim Aarons] was one of those moments when you felt a jump in the customer’s understanding of the brand — sales went up. It was one of those moments that you felt, “Okay, this is going to work and we’ve got this bit right.” We were a tiny brand then, but it was one of those things that people instantly engaged with. It didn’t need explaining — it was easily understood. It just felt very natural.
IH: This new collection with JJ Martins of La Double J is meant to be fairly gender-fluid, despite having some pieces labeled specifically for men or women. Can you speak a bit about the intention behind this fluidity?
AB: Although we [Orlebar Brown] make clothes for men, we’re not an overly “macho” brand. We have always been in touch with our softer side. The range of customers who come to OB — that’s always made me very happy. It’s always feels good when I see people in Ibiza or Mykonos or the south of France or in the Hamptons, whatever, [wearing OB]. It’s a whole range of ages, types, backgrounds buying the product, and that’s always been massively encouraging for me. Things like that translated into the first waiting list we ever had. This woman — I can’t remember her name — she had an independent store on the Upper East Side of New York and she bought some of our shorts for her womenswear brand, and we all thought she was mad.
Anyway, she bought them — and we had our first waiting list! She hadn’t placed a huge order. And for me that was kind of interesting, the fact that women went in and they were buying our shorts and cutting the nets out and wearing them over bikinis and wearing them over swimsuits and wearing them with baggy shirts. But that was kind of interesting to me because at that point we were marketing and targeting men. 23% of our customers are women, so there’s always been a question about how we keep women engaged with the brand. Women are hugely important to the brand, and that translates into products.
So we had the swim shorts — women were cutting the nets out and wearing them over their swimsuits. We also have a shirt called the “Ridley,” which is a baggy, looser fit, no-button, long-sleeved shirt, which is predominantly used as a print vehicle — we put print on it every season. That’s obviously a key part of this collection, and it’s been something that always felt like it could be worn by a man or a woman, it didn’t really matter. Things like a pajama drawstring trouser always felt like it could be worn by a man or a woman. We don’t have it in this collection, but our toweling polo shirts — we know they’re worn by women. We’ve seen pictures on Instagram and of women wearing either their boyfriend’s or their husbands. or they’ve bought them themselves.
So there’s always been that thread, or that sort of itch that needed scratching within the collection. So when JJ and I started talking, it just seemed very natural, and JJ, I know, has men as customers and for La Double J, and it didn’t seem like a big jump. It didn’t seem like anything we needed to say, but it was just innate in how we were approaching this. We’re all drowning in collaborations, and I think the idea of it not being forced and coming quite naturally — and not just making a print that went on to menswear and a print that went onto womenswear, but actually things which blended or merged or were relevant to everyone — was right there from the very beginning. It should just be there. We shouldn’t exclude those products just in this collaboration.
IH: There are a few patterns that were developed specifically for this collection. The colors are very vivid, the patterns very floral. Was there more inspiration from Rajasthan, like in your original collections, in these prints?
AB: It wasn’t India, although some of the prints, now that I’m thinking about it, are probably relevant to India. JJ is based in Milan — she works with print libraries and stuff around Lake Como, and they’re wonderful resources to go and start the process. When we were doing the storytelling and coming up with the original concepts, I think it felt like this person was probably in Europe, like they were probably around the south of France or Portofino or Greece. It felt dry — a stony beach and wooded places to have lunch and small boats and jetties and that dry heat. It felt like that world, so that’s where we sort of placed it, the print selection.
The design process was very collaborative. JJ, she’s the “ideas” person. We had mood boards of what we wanted it [the collection] to look like. I went out to Milan with our design director and a couple of others and we sat with them for a day. We worked this all through, and they came up with boards of print ideas, and it was really a process of editing down. And I think that process of talking to one another and learning from each other was hugely beneficial. There are so many collaborations and one of the things that makes the successful ones is when the DNA and the values of the brands line up. I think when two brands come together and it feels forced or it doesn’t feel genuine, then they go into rather weird places. But with this, clearly we have these words — sunshine, travel, happiness, good times — these are our references. And the La Double J clearly feels that. Their whole thing of quality, doing things properly, having authenticity, having integrity — they have it in spades. So the DNA and the values of the two brands worked out.
But we’ve also played with print for many years, whether that’s David Hicks-type geometrics, whether it’s working with graphic designers and illustrators and artists, whether it’s doing very floral prints, whether it’s in the photographic prints — whatever. But by doing this collaboration, it sort of took all Orlebar Brown away from those rather classic, English, restrained roots and took us into a very vibrant, colorful, playful, energetic world, and that was something we haven’t done.
We’ve done very floral prints, we’ve done very expressive and vibrant prints, but these were different — whether it’s the scale, whether it’s the richness of color, the red and white, all those sorts of things. And that sort of flamboyance was something we haven’t pushed ourselves [towards] that far, historically. So for me, this collaboration enables us to take Orlbear Brown from all those wonderful things that we’ve done over the last 15, 17 years into a new place, and I think ditto with La Double J.
I think working with Orlebar Brown took La Double J in a slightly different world to what they would normally do as well. And that makes it interesting during the design process: When we’re having our meetings, our conversations, you could see them mulling over when we put ideas in, and ditto with us chewing them over, and then they land somewhere and they feel right or they don’t feel right. But I love that process. I love those months of finding what is right, getting the strike-offs back, playing with scale, playing with placement. We haven’t historically done an awful lot of placement prints, but this is all very placed rather than just repeated.
IH: Speaking of which: What is the process like for translating a design between OB to La Double J or vice versa, or even of translating, say, a print between one particular product (perhaps swim trunks) to a silk shirt?
AB: I think things work at different scales, whether it’s for a man or a woman. A dress might have a different scale of a print to a man’s short-sleeve, button-through shirt. But if you want it to be genderless, you have to get the balance between that short-sleeve, button-through shirt to appeal to a woman as well. This was very much on our radar — we don’t want to make that print too small and too neat and too repeated, because we want to take in the more flamboyant world, we want it to feel more energetic and lively. Something a woman would want to wear over her swimsuit when she’s on the beach getting a cocktail, say.
The main thing is about placement and about scale of print — if it becomes very neat and very repeated, it might feel a bit masculine, it might feel a bit safe, it might feel a bit paisley, it might feel a bit expected. And I think by blowing it up, by placing it down the plaque, by making sure the sleeve has a part of a place band around the sleeve — those things take it into a different place than if you just used that print and reduced it and made it repeat.
IH: Orlebar Brown is making a high-end luxury product, but when you launched, was there any sticker shock to a relatively expensive pair of swim trunks that cost several hundred dollars? Was there a concerted marketing effort to help customers understand this pricing, and the type of value they were getting from a highly considered product? Has the perception in the marketplace changed at all since then?
AB: Because of my naïveté of the market, because I didn’t work for a brand and I had never worked in clothing before, I would have sleepless nights about what we could charge [with our original pricing]. At that point our pricing matched Vilbrequin’s. So we were not more expensive, but we were definitely the premium end of the marketplace for our swim shorts. When you think about pricing, first of all you think about where the fabric comes from. You think about quality, you think about how things are made. In the average boxer-short style [swim trunk], there are probably about 20 elements going into that: you have a front panel, the back panel, the pockets, the net inside. Now going into Orlebar Brown pairs, the Bulldog Classic Shorts, there are over 60 elements going to the making of one pair of shorts.
That’s eight pieces to a waistband — just one of the side tabs has four pieces. And all of those elements have to be sewn together. It’s a tailored swim short, it’s not a baggy boxer short. So there is structure to it. It has darts at the back. The waistband is shaped to sit higher above the bum and come down at the front slightly, so it gives a more flattering silhouette. But once you start explaining that — coupled with the fact that very early on we gave a five-year guarantee on all of our swim shorts — then the customer understands that we’re not just pulling this price out of thin air, that it’s based on costs. It is all European sourced and manufactured.
At that point, we weren’t making huge volumes. There’s a unique exclusivity to it. We changed the colors and the prints very regularly, and suddenly an innate value starts coming to that. And essentially it was up to us to find the right customer for the product. I think I played in the early days a lot with compromising the product or trying to get the cost down, and ultimately then you ended up with rather an average short.
I have in the office a box I call ‘The Chamber of Horrors’ and I must have over 60 pairs of shorts [in there] that are literally stitch-for-stitch Orlebar Brown — they’re copies with side fasteners. Now in the early days, that absolutely terrified me. I’d get so worried — they were way cheaper than us, but ultimately the customer doesn’t go back to them because the quality’s not there, nor the authenticity. We own that short and we own the side fastener and we own that tailored silhouette and all that sort of thing. And I think we’re very lucky — it’s become our hero product. The swim shorts are still over 35% of our total sales.
If you think of Burberry it’s the trench coat; you think of Hermès, it’s the Birkin; you think of Porsche, it’s the 911; if you think of Todd’s, it’s the car shoe — all these brands that have a hero product that stands the test of time and that is constantly reinvented or evolving, that’s a hugely valuable thing. And we absolutely acknowledge our Bulldogs shorts every day of the year because they are the center of how we design the collection. And they’ve been there for 17 years, unchanged.
The five-year guarantee definitely helped. In fact, if something does go wrong, we’ll exchange it, replace it, repair it if they want, whatever. But there has to be that trust with the customer about that price. There’s got to be value for money. Customers are not stupid; they’ll smell a rat pretty quickly. And I don’t believe we’re expensive. I think that if you look at anything now in the marketplace, just because of cost [of materials and labor], pricing has gone up. But I think the innate quality [of OB’s products] and two rows of stitching (rather than one) has a cost. There’s a quality there, and we’ll stand behind it, and if any customer has any problem, we’ll obviously replace it.
Shop the Orlebar Brown X La Double J High Vibration Vacation collection here.
Orlebar Brown x La DoubleJ Bulldog Dragonflower Print
Limited Edition: “Dragonflower Print Mid-Length Swim Shorts Woven In France in Summer Red/White Sand colour”
Orlebar Brown x La DoubleJ Pull-Up Shorts Morpheus Orange
Limited Edition: “Women’s Pull-Up Shorts Morpheus Orange”
Orlebar Brown x La DoubleJ Foulard Shirt Whitsun Placée Blue
Limited Edition: “Women’s Foulard Shirt Whitsun Placée Blue”
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