Nautical but Nice: Oliver Brown swimming shorts

Funny thing, isn’t it? (Funny ‘peculiar’, of course, not funny ‘ha-ha’.) Most of the time, when you know what you want, you generally know where to go to get it. Sausages from the butcher, bread from the baker and – if they still exist – candle sticks from the candle-stick maker. But a good, honest pair of swimming shorts are hard to come by. There’s no apparent reason for it; it’s just one of those things.

‘Something must be done,’ we thought, and so something we’ve done. Our swimming shorts are, we believe, the perfect balance: not so short that you’ll be mistaken for a 80s athlete, not so long as to be mistaken for a beach-bum’s board shorts; amusing designs that don’t demand a laugh, but then again not so boring as to betray no sense of adventure at all. They are, in fact, the Goldilocks of shorts, if Goldilocks were a gentleman off on his well-deserved hols.

We’ve designed them to be as comfortable at lunch as they are sloshing about in the shallow end. The polyamide material dries in a flash, and the 92% cotton mesh is as comfortable as you could wish. We’ve also included side and back pockets so you can keep your wallet and whatnot with you – but we leave it to you to make sure you empty them before executing that graceful swallow-dive off the board.