Harry’s Warm-Weather Fabric Guide
On the year’s hottest days, we repeatedly return to these three fabrics – and you should too.
No matter the garment, clothing can only function as well as its fabric allows. A winter coat made out of cotton won’t stand up to snow and –20°C temperatures and similarly, your favourite cashmere sweater wouldn’t be your first choice come the heat of high summer.
When you truly appreciate how certain fabrics are designed to perform, you understand how to wear them and why they deserve a place in your wardrobe. And, during an extreme season like summer, it’s in your best interest to know which clothes will keep you the coolest.
Linen
Linen is perhaps the quintessential summer fabric. This loosely woven natural fabric is made from flax fibres and the earliest evidence of linen dates back to over 30,000 years ago.
Linen’s open weave provides its natural lightweight, breathable, and odour resistant properties, though it’s no delicate material – the powerhouse summer fabric is also renowned for its durability and quick-drying quality. Linen’s characteristic crisp texture often creates wrinkles and creases, which offers a casual, laid-back aesthetic that adds to the fabric’s easy-going appeal.
Linen is best worn slightly loose to the body to allow for cooling airflow between the garment and your skin. For this reason, the best linen garments include shirts, trousers, knitwear, tailoring, and outerwear.
Seersucker
Seersucker is another classic summer fabric celebrated for its lightness of weight and trademark ‘puckered’ finish.
The fabric’s distinctive texture and hand-feel is actually the result of a unique weaving process, which alternates between smooth and puckered stripes, rather than a natural property of the cotton fibres. This unique weaving technique creating raised ‘puckering’ allows the fabric to stand away from the skin, permitting airflow between the fabric and its wearer.
In the summer months, seersucker is a fabric of choice for tailoring when lightweight, breathable materials are best. Today, you can also find casual shirts, shorts, and even swimwear made from cotton seersucker.
Madras
Madras might be the least commonly spotted on the list, though it makes just as strong a claim as a stalwart warm-weather fabric as any.
This lightweight cotton fabric is woven from fragile, short-staple fibres that cannot be combed, only carded, due to their short length, which results in small bumps and slubs unique to madras. The madras pattern is a form of tartan design made with multiple vibrant colours and both sides of the cloth must have the same pattern.
Madras takes its name from the Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras), the place in which the fabric was created. Due to its lightness of weight and bold colours, madras is primarily used to create casual summer garments like shirts and shorts.