Nicholas Daley 70’s Trouser – Navy Linen

Linen is a bast fibre, taken from the stalk of the flax plant rather than from a seed or an animal, and that origin explains everything it does. It is stronger wet than dry. It conducts heat away from the body instead of trapping it. It has almost no elasticity at all, so it falls in long flat folds rather than clinging, and it creases the moment it is asked to bend. Irish linen has been the reference point for the fibre for three centuries, and in navy it stops being a holiday cloth and becomes a serious one.

Against that, Daley has set waxed cotton: a fabric impregnated with paraffin so that water runs off it, which darkens where it creases and holds every mark it is given. Put the two on one pair of trousers and you have one of the softest materials in dress interrupted by one of the hardest. That collision is the whole method of the house arriving on a garment you could wear to lunch, and the seventies proportion, high on the waist and full through the thigh, is what holds the two halves together.

We bought this for the summer and for the contrast panel, which is the detail that makes a plain navy linen unmistakably his. It is also the pair we hand a customer who wants to understand what Nicholas Daley does without committing to a coat.

The 70's Trouser is one of the styles Nicholas Daley returns to across collections, remade each time in whatever cloth the season is built around.

High on the waist and full through the thigh, running clean to the hem. Linen relaxes considerably through a day of wearing and comes back with a wash, so a trouser that fits at nine in the morning and feels generous at six is behaving exactly as it should. Take your usual waist. The waxed panel does not move at all, so where it sits on the leg it will feel firmer than the linen around it.

With a plain tee this is the whole summer. With the Three-Pocket Cardigan in blue it becomes something closer to an outfit. Sandals or a soft loafer; nothing with a heavy sole, which fights the drape.

The waxed panel is the constraint on everything else. Waxed cotton must not be machine washed, tumble dried, or dry cleaned, because all three strip the wax out of the weave. Sponge marks off with cold water and no detergent, dry away from heat, and re-wax the panel when it starts to look thirsty. Have the trouser cleaned by someone who has been told there is wax on it. Our fabric care guidance covers the rest.

The 70s Trouser in purple mohair is the winter half of the same pair, in a Scottish cloth. The Wide Beach Short is the linen cut short, and the Three-Pocket Cardigan is the linen layer above. Everything we carry from Nicholas Daley is listed together.