Massimo Alba Florida Jacket – Linen

Eight percent of anything sounds like a rounding error, and in a linen cloth it is not. Linen's surface is matte, slubbed, and irregular, and it absorbs light rather than returning any of it, which is why linen in a pale colour can look chalky and linen in a dark one can look dusty. Silk does the opposite. It is one of the few natural fibres with a triangular cross-section, so it refracts light instead of scattering it. Introduce even a small proportion into a linen cloth and the whole surface acquires a faint, intermittent lustre that moves as the garment moves. It does not make the linen look like silk. It makes the linen look alive.

The cloth is striped, natural with a light tan running through it, and the two colours sit close enough together that at any distance the stripe reads as texture rather than as pattern. That is the correct amount of stripe for a jacket. High-contrast stripes on outerwear belong to deckchairs and to blazers, both of which announce themselves from across a street, and neither is what anybody wants from a linen jacket in July. A tonal stripe does the opposite, and it gives the silk somewhere to work: the lustre travels along the lines and stops where they do, so the surface moves in bands rather than all at once.

Cut as a shirt jacket, which is the shape this model has always been, the cloth is doing effectively all of the work. There is nothing propping the garment up and nothing distracting from the surface.

The Florida is the model this house re-cuts every season in a different cloth, and each version is a genuinely different jacket rather than a colour change. This is the warm-weather one, and the silk is the reason it does not look like every other linen jacket in July.

The Florida recurs in Massimo Alba's line more persistently than any other model, remade each season in whatever cloth the season is about. Linen and silk is the summer answer.

Ninety-two percent linen, eight percent silk, made in Italy. Cut as a shirt jacket, in a natural ground with a light tan stripe. Colour: Summer Sand.

Cut as a shirt jacket, so it is roomier through the body than a tailored jacket and shorter in the skirt. It goes over a shirt or a fine knit easily. Linen creases from the first wearing and has no recovery, so take the size you can move in, and if you intend to wear it as an outer layer over a knit, the larger of two sizes is the more useful garment. It softens considerably over the first season.

Over the Bowles button-up in Sand or the Genova in Bianco, with the Ionio2 in Ferro. Over the Nizza with the Kevin shorts. A tonal stripe wants plain cloth around it, so keep whatever goes underneath solid. Natural and light tan against white is the plainest reading and the best one.

Air it and hang it on a shaped hanger rather than washing it often. There is silk in the cloth, so keep it out of direct sun and away from a hot iron, both of which will dull a lustre this faint before they do anything else. Our care guidance for mixed cloths covers the rest.

The Florida Jacket in wool, silk, and cashmere is the winter cloth and the Florida Cotton Shirt Jacket in Smoke is the cotton. The Catch2 Jacket is the linen jacket cut single-breasted, and the Bowles Button-Up in Sand is cut in Summer Sand as well. Everything we carry from Massimo Alba is listed together.