The Life
Notes from a slow August
Ten days off the Ligurian coast, with a bag that held five things, and what it taught us about how little a well-dressed man needs.
26 August 2025
The boat was built in 1961 and has been maintained ever since by a family in Lavagna who charge too little and take too long. She sails badly upwind and beautifully everywhere else, which is a fair description of most pleasant things.
The bag held five items: two linen shirts, one pair of pleated trousers, swim shorts, a cashmere-silk knit for the evening, and espadrilles. Nothing was chosen to be photographed. Everything was chosen because it would still be wearable on day nine.
On salt and softness
Linen improves under conditions that ruin most cloth. Salt water, sun, a rinse in fresh water, drying flat on warm teak — after a week the shirt had a hand you cannot buy, only earn. This is the argument for natural fibre in a sentence: it has a second life, and the second life is better than the first.
It has a second life, and the second life is better than the first.
The economy of doing nothing
Nobody on board wore a watch after the second day. Meals happened when someone was hungry enough to cook. The only appointment of the trip was the light at seven, when the cliffs go copper and everything stops for twenty minutes whether you agree to it or not.
There is a version of wealth that is loud, scheduled and photographed. It is very expensive and looks exhausting. The other version is a boat that leaks slightly, a shirt washed too many times, and no reason to be anywhere before dinner.
What we brought home
Two of the pieces in the current collection came directly from that fortnight: the olive linen trousers, cut a centimetre wider through the thigh after ten days of sitting cross-legged on a deck, and the ivory polo, which exists because the shirt we had was almost right and not quite.
