Last year, my old Paul Stuart trousers bit the dust. I’d had the beauties since 2014, ever since an initial visit to interview Ralph Auriemma, so they’d done well. But in the middle of last summer they finally wore through.
I did look at patching them, but there were no similar linens available. Linens have a tendency to come in greens that are either quite grassy, I find, or rather blue. There’s little in the browner, more olive part of the spectrum despite that being very wearable in my experience.
This inevitably came up in a conversation with Nathan Hellard that summer, the lovely Frenchman who runs the linen company Maison Hellard (great piece by Manish on visiting them here). Nathan offered to recreate my olive shade, and after a couple of false starts, we finally got it right.
The Paul Stuart trousers had been featured a few times on PS over the years, as you can see in the images above. Each time, I mentioned I couldn’t find anything similar in the bunches and that never changed.
I assume mills tend towards strong green linens because they seem more summery – but when part of an outfit, that kind of green tends to dominate everything else. It’s also perfectly possible to celebrate the sun with the other parts of the outfit.
In general, olive greens are generally easier to wear in big cities too, and in places where it isn’t sunny every day of the warmer months. Also better in the evening.
The best illustration of this versatility, I find, is that these olive greens go equally well with both brown and black shoes – it’s a decent proxy for them working with different worlds of colour.
In the image above, for example, I’m wearing a pair of trousers in the new linen with a mid-brown jacket, denim shirt and dark-brown loafers. It’s a nice combination, not too far from the far older one shown of me higher up, in Florence, scribbling notes before the Tailors Symposium.
But in the image below, I’m wearing those same trousers with black shoes, and then neutrals work well elsewhere – white and grey. Because this olive linen is darker, browner and fairly muted, it works equally well with these group of colours.
Regular readers, of course, will know that the same logic was the reason behind our Fox Flannel in an equally muddy green. And my favourite pair of coloured high-twist trousers is a similar olive in the Fox Air bunch.
The colours you like and how you want to dress are of course both highly subjective, but for me these are particularly stylish and enjoyable combinations.
The linen is available to buy on the Maison Hellard website – not ours. This also means that tailors should buy in the same way they usually do from Hellard, as part of their regular orders.
The quality is Hellard’s regular 360g (12.5oz) 2×2 twill, which I’ve found good in other trousers I’ve had in the past (the reason we chose it, of course). It wears lighter than the weight sounds, and I’d say sits between the Italian and Irish linens in terms of stiffness.
I have only had it made into trousers, as I know that’s what I will use the most – with jackets in the summer ranging from cream and beige and brown, to black, grey and dark navy. But it could also be used for a suit – indeed a three-way suit, with an softly-tailored jacket in it making a nice casual summer option.
The linen is regular width (150cm) and is woven in Italy and piece-dyed. Retail price is £98 (€112) a metre, excluding taxes. Hellard offers free shipping for all orders over €200.
There are currently 87m available, but we will certainly reweave it if that runs out.
The old images shown are taken from the following articles:
The clothes shown in the new shoot are, with brown:
And with black:
