Engineered Garments RF Trousers

The five-pocket pattern is so familiar that it has stopped being visible. Two front scoops, two back patches, and the small one inside the right front, which was a watch pocket in 1873 and has held nothing in particular since. It was drawn for denim workwear, it was reinforced at the stress points with rivets, and every element of it answered to a miner’s requirements. A century and a half later it is simply the shape a trouser is, and that ubiquity is precisely what makes it interesting to execute in something else.

In a cotton with ten percent linen through it, the pattern loses its denim associations entirely and becomes what it actually is: a well-worked-out arrangement of pockets on a straight leg. The linen does two things. It scatters slubs and irregularities through the weave, so the surface has a broken texture that flat cotton does not, and it makes the cloth cooler, because linen carries heat away from the body faster than almost anything else that can be woven. What you get is a five-pocket trouser for summer, which denim is bad at.

Why we selected it

Everyone owns the five-pocket shape in denim and almost nobody owns it in anything else. This is the version that works in July.

The colours

Natural and olive are the two, and on this cloth they are not the same decision. Natural sits close to the colour the yarn arrives in, so the linen slubs read as pale interruptions across a pale ground and the surface registers as texture before it registers as colour. Olive absorbs the slubs into the ground instead, so the trouser reads flat from across a room and textured in the hand. Natural is the one that goes under everything and shows what it has been through; olive is the one that shows very little, and it is the shade this house comes back to more than any other.

Materials and construction

Ninety percent cotton, ten percent linen, made in the USA. Straight leg with a five-pocket arrangement. Colours: Natural and Olive.

Fit notes

Straight through the leg, falling from the knee without narrowing. A cotton-linen blend has slightly less give than pure cotton, so take the size you can sit in. It creases from the linen and softens considerably across a season. Both colours are cut on the one pattern, so the fit does not change between them.

Styling

In natural, with the Work Shirt and nothing over it, which is the plainest summer reading available. In olive, under the Trucker Jacket in the same blend, or with the Polo Shirt in white. Either colour takes indigo well, and neither wants a second strong colour.

Care

Wash cool and hang to dry. Press damp rather than hot if you press it. This is a two-fibre cloth, so treat it as the more delicate of the two would want. Our care guidance for mixed cloths covers the rest.

Related pieces

The Painter Pant in olive is cut from the same cotton and linen cloth, and the Trucker Jacket is the jacket in it. The Sailor Pant in linen and cotton is the summer trouser, and the Work Shirt in natural the shirt. There is more on the house on the Engineered Garments designer page. Everything we carry from Engineered Garments is listed together.